Occupational Therapy in Japan: Key Statistics

By Hiroemon · Last updated: 2026-08-09

I’m a licensed occupational therapist in Japan, and I built this page because the English-language numbers on Japanese OT are badly out of date. Outside a single WFOT page updated in 2025, most English sources report figures from 2014–2016 — including the national association’s own English statistics page. Everything below is drawn from current Japanese-language primary sources: JAOT’s annual membership survey, Ministry of Health, Labour and Welfare exam results and facility surveys, and OECD data. I update it as each source publishes.

One warning before the numbers, because it changes how you should use the headline figure — and how you should treat every international comparison you have read about Japanese OT.

Read This Before Quoting the Headline Number

Japan’s most-quoted OT figure — 118,465 — is a cumulative count of people who have qualified, not a headcount of therapists at work. JAOT’s own footnote states it plainly: the number sums every national-exam passer since 1966 and subtracts only the deaths the association is aware of. Unregistered licenses, revoked licenses, unrecorded deaths, career changers, and everyone who has left the profession all remain inside it.

This matters beyond pedantry, because that same figure appears to be what Japan reports internationally. WFOT’s Human Resources Project lists Japan’s practising occupational therapists as 108,872 in its 2024 dataset. JAOT’s cumulative registration count as of March 31, 2023 was 108,885 — a difference of 13 people, or 0.012%. WFOT publishes no per-country reference date, so the match itself is the evidence. The practical consequence: when Japan appears near the top of an international league table of OT numbers, it is being counted on a more generous basis than countries reporting therapists actually in practice. That is why this page publishes no international ranking of therapist numbers. For a workforce figure closer to reality, the most useful number below is the 55,984 JAOT members who reported being in work.

The Profession in Numbers

Source: JAOT membership statistics for FY2024. The per-100,000 figure is computed here from 118,465 qualified OTs and a national population of 123,420,000 (Statistics Bureau population estimate, confirmed value for March 1, 2025) — and inherits the cumulative-count caveat above.

A young profession

Japanese occupational therapy is strikingly young as a workforce. Members aged 26–40 make up 53.6% of members who reported a birth date, and 89.8% are 50 or under (both computed from the published age table, whose base is 63,334 — 18 members did not report a birth date). Members who qualified before 1990 number 1,621 — 2.6% of the membership. The profession only began in 1966 with two schools and 22 qualified therapists, and the growth curve since then still dominates its age structure.

Growth — and a Turn

Source: JAOT membership statistics, FY1994–FY2024 series (figures are year-end membership).

The story in that table is the last three rows. After three decades of uninterrupted growth, JAOT membership peaked in FY2022 and has fallen in each of the two years since — down 1,136 from the peak. The number of qualified therapists kept rising over the same period, so what is shrinking is not the profession but the share of it that belongs to the association: organization rate stood at 69% in 2016 and about 53.5% in 2025. I have not seen a satisfying published explanation for the turn, and I would treat any single-cause account with suspicion.

Where therapists work — and the shift underneath

Among members reporting a field: medical settings account for 71.8% and long-term care for 18.4%. That second figure is the one to watch — in 1994 it was 7.5%. Over thirty years the long-term care share has grown about two and a half times, which is the clearest statistical trace of Japan’s aging inside this profession. Clinical work remains the main duty for 94.8% of members reporting one; 33 members report research as their main duty.

Note: the field-mix series has a discontinuity at FY2020, when JAOT redesigned its survey categories and non-responses jumped; comparisons spanning that year should be read with care. Membership totals are unaffected.

Entering the Profession

Source: MHLW national exam results, 57th–61st exams. Pass rates are calculated on candidates who sat the exam, not on applicants.

Two movements run in opposite directions here. The pass rate has risen at each of the last four exams, from 80.5% at the 57th to 91.2% at the 61st, with new graduates reaching 96.6%. (The 56th exam, in 2021, sat higher than the 57th at 81.3%, so the run of increases starts from the 57th.) Meanwhile candidate numbers have fallen since the 59th exam, and the 61st drew the smallest field of the five. More of those who sit are passing; fewer are sitting.

On the supply side, JAOT’s 2025 directory lists 204 school entries covering 210 courses, 193 of which have at least one course still recruiting. The 196 courses still recruiting have a combined admission quota of 7,090 places — 5,025 across 141 four-year courses and 2,065 across 55 three-year courses. Both lengths are offered by universities and by vocational colleges; the directory records course length, not institution type. (Fourteen courses have suspended recruitment and publish no quota, so this is not a total for all 210.) Quota is planned capacity, not actual enrollment. How these routes work is covered in the education guide.

The System Around the Profession

Two structural facts shape where Japanese OTs work. First, the profession sits overwhelmingly in the private non-profit health sector: among the 54,462 members who reported an employer type (the count excludes members on leave and non-respondents), 58.0% are employed by medical corporations — the private non-profit form most Japanese hospitals and clinics take — with public medical institutions a distant second at 11.6%. That classifies the employing body, not the care setting. Second, Japan’s psychiatric sector is unusually large by international standards — and here, unlike therapist counts, the figures are at least collected on a common OECD definition, though national system boundaries still differ (see the note below the table).

Source: OECD Data Explorer, hospital beds by function (psychiatric care), retrieved August 2026. All figures are for 2023, the latest year with broad coverage — only eight countries have reported 2024 so far, and Japan is not among them. Japan ranks first among the 35 OECD member countries reporting 2023 data; the average and country count are computed from that set.

In domestic terms that is 316,147 psychiatric beds — 21.5% of all hospital beds — with 1,057 hospitals classified as psychiatric hospitals (psychiatric beds also exist as wards inside general hospitals), and an average length of stay of 255.0 days (October 2024). The count has been falling steadily, from 355,966 beds in 2002 and 349,321 in 2008. These differences reflect how countries divide responsibility between health systems and social care rather than a simple quality ranking; in some countries people in comparable situations are counted in social welfare facilities instead. What the numbers do explain is why psychiatric practice is a major branch of Japanese OT — as I describe from inside it in the practice guide.

Notes on Using These Numbers

• Two different populations. Qualified-therapist figures (118,465) come from cumulative exam records; everything about age, gender, workplace, and field comes from JAOT’s membership survey, which covers about 53.5% of qualified therapists. Do not apply a membership percentage to the 118,465 base.
• Beware the stale English figures. JAOT’s own English statistics page still reports 80,159 therapists and 186 schools — numbers from 2016. They are useful as history, not as current data.
• Computed figures are labeled. Where a percentage or rate is not printed in the source document, this page says it was computed.
• Fiscal years. Japanese statistics run April–March; “FY2024” data carries a reference date of March 31, 2025.

Frequently Asked Questions

Primary Sources

Every figure on this page was checked against the sources below on 2026-08-09. Exam results are republished each late March and JAOT’s membership statistics each autumn — verify against the current versions before relying on them.

• JAOT membership statistics — annual survey; FY2024 edition (reference date March 31, 2025) is the basis for membership, demographic, workplace, and field figures and the 1994–2024 series
• MHLW national exam results (61st exam) — with the 57th–60th results published on the ministry’s corresponding pages for 2022–2025
• JAOT directory of OT training schools (2025) — course counts and admission quotas
• MHLW Survey of Medical Institutions and Hospital Report (2024) — psychiatric beds, facilities, average length of stay
• OECD Data Explorer — hospital beds by function — international psychiatric bed rates
• Statistics Bureau of Japan — population estimates — denominator for the per-100,000 calculation
• JAOT “Occupational Therapy in Numbers” (English) — FY2016 data; cited here only as a historical milestone and as evidence that the official English figures are out of date
• WFOT Human Resources Project 2024 and WFOT’s Japan page — international dataset discussed in the definition section