There is a small community of Mongolians in Japan, representing a minor portion of emigration from
Mongolia. As of December 2023, there were 19,490 registered
Mongolian citizens residing in
Japan, according to the Immigration Services Agency, up from 2,545 in 2003.[2]
Students
International students form a large proportion of the registered population of Mongolians in Japan.[3] The earliest Mongol exchange students, all three of them women, came to Japan in 1906, when Mongolia was still ruled by the
Qing Dynasty.[4] Japan was also a popular destination for students from
Mengjiang (in today's
Inner Mongolia) in the late 1930s and early 1940s; among them were several who would go on to become famous scholars, such as
Chinggeltei.[5][6] Japan and the
Mongolian People's Republic officially agreed to send exchange students to each other in 1974; the first Mongolian student to arrive under the agreement came in 1976. As of May 2006[update], 1,006 Mongolian students were studying in Japanese institutions of higher education.[3]
Aside from Mongolian citizens, there were also estimated to be roughly 4,000 members of the
Mongolian minority of China residing in Japan as of 2005[update]. Like migrants from Mongolia proper, they also came mostly on student visas, beginning in the 1990s; they were sponsored by professors of Mongolian studies at Japanese universities. They are a close-knit community; they reside mostly in the
Nerima and
Sugamo areas of
Tokyo and in many cases the same apartment has been occupied serially by successive migrants for more than a decade, with each passing the lease on to another migrant before leaving the country or moving on to different accommodation.[7]
Starting in 1991, Mongolians began to become especially prominent in
sumo; as of 2005[update], Mongolians composed roughly 5% of all ranked sumo wrestlers, making them more than 60% (37 out of 61) of non-Japanese rikishi in Japan.[8][9] In a 2009 survey conducted by a Japanese statistical agency, of the four sumo wrestlers named as most famous by Japanese people, three were Mongolian.[10]
^横田 素子[YOKOTA Motoko] (2009),
1906年におけるモンゴル人学生の日本留学 [The first Mongolian students in Japan in 1906] (PDF), East West South North (in Japanese) (15): 155–172, archived from
the original(PDF) on 2011-09-30, retrieved 2009-10-18
^徐志民 [XU Zhimin],
抗战时期日本对蒙疆地区留日学生政策述 [Review of policies towards Mengjiang students studying in Japan during World War II], Journal of Inner Mongolia University (in Chinese (China)), 38 (5)
^草原名人：开创蒙古语言研究黄金时期的清格尔泰 [Famous man of the plains: Chinggeltei, who pioneered the golden age of Mongolian language research], People's Daily (in Chinese (China)), 2007-07-19, retrieved 2010-06-02
