Approximately 127 million people in Japan as well as Japanese emigrants around the world, in particular in North and South America. During the Meiji period (1868-1912) when there was a shortage of work in Japan and overpopulation problems, about 850,000 Japanese emigrated to the USA (in particular, California and Hawaii), about 12,000 to Canada (mainly British Columbia) and, until World War II, about 190,000 to Brazil. The issei (first generation) spoke Japanese as their first language and many of the nisei (second generation) did so too, mainly attending Japanese schools and mixing only with the Japanese communities. By contrast, most sansei and yonsei (third and fourth generations) have been assimilated into their countries of birth, do not speak Japanese and have never visited Japan. In recent years, countries such as Australia have become emigration destinations for well-off retired Japanese couples and, as Japanese communities have grown in areas such as Queensland, Australians have expressed concerns about caring for this elderly Japanese population.

Japanese is also the second language of older Chinese and Korean people who are either resident in Japan or were forcibly taught Japanese during the occupation of their countries. Since the 1970s, and in line with Japanese industrial growth abroad, more and more people around the world have begun to learn Japanese as a foreign language. This is particularly so in countries around the Pacific Rim such as East Asia, South-east Asia, Australia, New Zealand and North America. It has become the fifth most popular foreign language in the USA, it is the first modern foreign language on the curriculum in many Australian and New Zealand secondary schools and in the UK it is now the most popular minority language (after French, German, Spanish and Italian) taught in secondary schools. The Japanese government is encouraging more foreign students to study in Japanese institutions of higher education and in 2000 there were over 50,000 foreign students in Japan with the highest number from Korea, China and Taiwan but substantial numbers from the USA and Brazil too. An estimated 3 million people around the globe, including 2 million Chinese, are currently learning Japanese.

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