To your first question: this is simply the cost-of-doing-business here, driven (largely) by Japan's expectation that the company is the primary interface betwee

To your first question: this is simply the cost-of-doing-business here, driven (largely) by Japan's expectation that the company is the primary interface between a citizen and the government, and therefore the company bears responsibility for sending a licensed professional to the relevant offices approximately monthly bearing filings relevant to their employees, and this licensed professional has the opposite of economies of scale if they're taking in filings for 1 employee. (There's also a premium built into that price for service in English, which is something most accountancies in Japan can't offer in-house.) It is not particularly expensive to incorporate a company in Japan and, while capital requirements were once in the $30k range, they're functionally $0 now. I will not speculate as to the original poster's financial circumstances.