If you hold a Japanese residence card but have no local credit history, only some carriers will say so on their own official site. We only rank the ones that do — every other carrier is listed honestly as unconfirmed, never guessed in or out.
21 carriers explicitly confirm they accept foreign residents. At 3GB/month, the cheapest is Rakuten Mobile's 3GB–Unlimited plan at ¥1,078/month (as of September 11, 2026).
From each carrier's own official site only — not a summary site, not a guess. "Not stated" means we could not find the provider addressing that question either way, which is different from a "no."
| Carrier | Accepts foreign residents | Residence card as ID | Min. remaining validity | Support language(s) | Payment without a Japanese credit card |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Daredemo Mobile | Yes | Yes | Not specified | Japanese | Yes |
| Daredemo Sumaho | Yes | Yes | Not specified | Japanese | Yes |
| Sunsyscon | Yes | Yes | Not specified | Japanese | Yes |
| TONE Mobile | Yes | Yes | 24 months | Japanese | Yes, with conditions |
| IIJmio | Yes | Yes | Not specified | Japanese | No — credit card only |
| mineo | Yes | Yes | Not specified | Japanese | Not stated |
| AEON Mobile | Yes | Yes | Not specified | Japanese | No — credit card only |
| HIS Mobile | Yes | Yes | Not specified | Japanese | No — credit card only |
| NURO Mobile | Yes | Yes | Not specified | Japanese | Not stated |
| BIGLOBE Mobile | Yes | Yes | Not specified | Japanese | Not stated |
| y.u mobile | Yes | Yes | Not specified | Japanese | No — credit card only |
| LIBMO | Yes | Yes | Not specified | Japanese | No — credit card only |
| QT Mobile | Yes | Yes | Not specified | Japanese | Not stated |
| J:COM Mobile | Yes | Yes | Not specified | Japanese | Not stated |
| LinksMate | Yes | Yes | Not specified | Japanese | Yes, with conditions |
| DTI SIM | Yes | Yes | Not specified | Japanese | Not stated |
| ahamo | Yes | Yes | Not specified | Japanese | Yes |
| povo2.0 | Yes | Yes | 3 months | Japanese, English, Korean, Vietnamese, Chinese | Yes |
| LINEMO | Yes | Yes | Not specified | Japanese, English | Yes |
| Y!mobile | Yes | Yes | 3 months | Japanese, English | Yes |
| Rakuten Mobile | Yes | Yes | Not specified | Japanese, English | Yes |
The exact list of accepted ID documents is long and carrier-specific (often Japanese-language legal text); rather than machine-translate it, each carrier's page links to the official source. See our residence-card guide for what this generally means.
Only carriers confirmed above as accepting foreign residents are ranked. Cost includes the setup/SIM-issue fee, spread over 12 months, with no conditional discounts applied (the honest, unconditional price). This ranking also assumes 20 minutes of calls a month, averaging 3 minutes per call — carriers with cheaper per-minute or bundled-minute calling can rank differently at a different call volume, including zero calls.
| Rank | Carrier / plan | Real monthly cost | Setup fee | eSIM |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Rakuten Mobile3GB–Unlimited | ¥1,078 | ¥0 | Yes |
| 2 | HIS Mobile1–10GB | ¥1,405 | ¥3,300 | Yes |
| 3 | povo2.03–30GB | ¥1,540 | ¥0 | Yes |
| 4 | NURO Mobile3–15GB | ¥1,544 | ¥3,740 | Yes |
| 5 | IIJmio2–55GB | ¥1,701 | ¥3,733 | Yes |
| 6 | AEON Mobile1–50GB | ¥1,793 | ¥3,300 | Yes |
| 7 | LinksMate1–45GB | ¥1,828 | ¥550 | Yes |
| 8 | LIBMO3–60GB | ¥1,841 | ¥3,733 | Yes |
| 9 | y.u mobile5GB | ¥1,843 | ¥3,740 | No |
| 10 | LINEMO3–10GB | ¥1,861 | ¥3,850 | Yes |
| 11 | DTI SIM2–16GB | ¥1,961 | ¥3,733 | No |
| 12 | TONE MobileUnlimited | ¥1,961 | ¥3,733 | Yes |
These carriers don't appear in the ranking above — not because they refuse foreign residents, but because we could not find their official site stating either way. Most likely they are reachable in Japanese only and/or expect a Japanese credit card, which is itself useful information for an applicant without Japanese credit history.
Among the 21 carriers we checked, some explicitly confirm a non-credit-card payment method (bank transfer, debit, or convenience-store payment) on their official site, some explicitly require a credit card, and for others the provider simply doesn't state it. The "Payment without a Japanese credit card" column below shows which is which per carrier — check it before assuming either way.
Most carriers we checked don't publish a specific minimum remaining validity for a residence card. The one exception we found is TONE Mobile, whose official FAQ states a foreign registration card with less than 24 months remaining may be declined. For every other carrier, we could not find an official minimum stated either way — bring a card with as much validity remaining as you reasonably can, and confirm with the carrier if you're close to expiry.
A few carriers (Daredemo Mobile, Daredemo Sumaho, Sunsyscon) explicitly advertise that they don't run the shared industry credit-history check (TCA unpaid-bill registry) that most Japanese carriers use, and that a past unpaid phone bill elsewhere won't block you. That said, several of them still reserve the right to decline an application case-by-case (for suspected resale, fraud, or organized-crime ties) — "no credit check" isn't the same as "no screening at all." We quote each carrier's own wording on its brand page rather than summarizing it away.
At our standard comparison usage (3GB/month, 20 minutes of calls a month averaging 3 minutes/call, 12-month cost horizon including setup fees), the cheapest plan among carriers that confirm they accept foreign residents is Rakuten Mobile's 3GB–Unlimited plan at ¥1,078/month (as of September 11, 2026).
4 carriers we checked don't state clearly, on their own official site, whether they accept a foreign resident without Japanese credit history — not because they refuse, but because they simply don't address it. We list them separately below rather than guessing them into (or out of) the ranking.