Newsletter Archive

About this newsletter series

The newsletter published through this domain was a multilingual health information series produced for foreign residents living in Japan. Over a decade of publication, it covered the full range of topics that foreign residents encounter when navigating Japan's healthcare system: how national health insurance works, what to do in a medical emergency, how to read a prescription, where to access multilingual support in each prefecture, and how seasonal health risks differ across Japan's diverse climate zones.

The series addressed the systemic challenges that make healthcare difficult for non-Japanese speakers: the concentration of medical records in Japanese-language paper formats, the absence of multilingual staff at most community clinics, the complexity of the welfare support system that foreign residents are legally entitled to access but rarely know about, and the significant variation in municipal support services from one city or town to the next.

Individual issues were numbered sequentially. Some issues focused on specific policy developments — changes to the health insurance system, expansions of the designated intractable disease list, updates to the maternal and child health handbook. Others were thematic guides: how to handle medical costs when treatment is unexpectedly expensive, how to access care during pregnancy, how to navigate the system if you or a family member is diagnosed with a serious condition.

The archive below is a complete index of all 182 issues identified in the publication record. Issues where the original title has been recovered are marked with their title. A small number of issues have been rebuilt as extended English guides on their topics, reflecting current guidance as of September 2026.

The newsletter covered health topics across a long publication period in which Japan's policy environment changed considerably. The Affordable and Accessible Health System reforms of the mid-2010s altered how high-cost medical expenses are calculated and reimbursed. Immigration policy changes in 2019 created new visa categories and brought hundreds of thousands of additional foreign workers into the system. The COVID-19 pandemic of 2020 to 2023 interrupted some services and accelerated others. Where specific policy details in a given issue may have changed, the general orientations — understanding the structure of the system, knowing what entitlements exist, finding multilingual support — remain broadly valid guidance.

For practical healthcare guidance, see the guides library, the glossary, and the prefecture-by-prefecture multilingual support directory. For reports and activity records from the same organisation, see the reports archive.