Just have to quote this:
"I literally discovered your blog researching if it's legal to operate a US-based software company while living in Japan. WTF is the internet."
WTF is the Internet, indeed. (Aside: This is the kind of question which is *maddening* to get signal on!)
"I literally discovered your blog researching if it's legal to operate a US-based software company while living in Japan. WTF is the internet."
WTF is the Internet, indeed. (Aside: This is the kind of question which is *maddening* to get signal on!)
I probably Googled variations of the same thing a hundred times, and then asked some lawyers/accountants/Important People In Positions Who Should Know This, and the best answers I got was "You have not framed the question correctly, and so I cannot answer it definitively."
My great, great frustration is that the legal, regulatory, and cultural agar plate in which Serious Professionals live strongly counsels them against giving you the factual answer: "Japan and the US both enthusiastically support that use case but neither will tell you how."
(Governments are gradually getting better in doing things like e.g. publishing Small Entity Compliance Guides or writing about tax compliance procedures in languages that some likely taxpayers will likely speak, but... these documents are not optimized for user task success.)
Like, one example of a million: the Ministry of Justice publishes no formal guidelines for cases under which a foreign engineer could sponsor their own visa, and if you were to ask them directly they would say that is not a thing, and yet a certain business said the magic words.
(And believe me after they said "Oh those were indeed the magic words" that determination promptly got filed and then had other facts layered on top of it such that any bureaucrat disagreeing that the words were effective would be arguing with multiple government agencies.)
