Hiring a Japanese Chef in Busan: Tourist Restaurant Route

Most advice about hiring a Japanese chef in South Korea is written with Seoul in mind: a large Japanese community, many candidates already in the city, and plenty of restaurants big enough to meet the E-7 employer tests. Busan is different. The local Japanese pool is much smaller, and many Japanese restaurants are independent places that may struggle with the floor area, tax and headcount minimums. For those restaurants, one route deserves a closer look: designation as a tourist restaurant. This guide explains it. The national E-7 rules are in our guide to hiring a Japanese chef in South Korea.

1. Busan is not a smaller Seoul

• MOFA's 2025 ranking of the 50 cities with the most Japanese residents includes Seoul (14,496) but not Busan. MOFA does not publish a Busan figure in that report.
• The Consulate-General of Japan in Busan covers the Gyeongsang region, including the metropolitan cities of Busan, Daegu and Ulsan. Its information page does not give a count of Japanese residents.
• South Korea as a whole had 44,471 Japanese nationals and 19,800 Japanese restaurants in 2025, the restaurant count up 1,590 on 2023 (MOFA, MAFF). There is no official Busan breakdown of either.

Without a city figure, the practical conclusion is simple. A Busan restaurant should expect a thin local pool of Japanese cooks who already have the right to work, and should plan earlier than a Seoul restaurant for the possibility of hiring from Japan.

2. The tourist restaurant route

In the version of the E-7 manual text reviewed for our Korea guide, the employers eligible to hire foreign cooks were listed in four groups. One of them was tourist hotels and tourist restaurants. The other groups included restaurants specialising in foreign tourists, in-flight catering, and foreign cuisine restaurants meeting minimums for floor area, VAT paid and Korean staff.

A tourist restaurant (관광식당업) is a designation under Korea's Tourism Promotion Act, not simply a restaurant that sees tourists. Under the Act's enforcement rules (Article 14), applications for tourist restaurant designation go to the regional tourism association, not to the city or district office. For a Busan restaurant that means the tourism association for the Busan region. The criteria are in Annex 2 of the enforcement rules (Article 15).

Whether being designated changes your E-7 position, and how the number of foreign cooks is then calculated, depends on the current Ministry of Justice manual. Check that before you apply for designation for this reason alone.

3. Designation criteria for foreign specialty cuisine

The copy of Annex 2 we downloaded from Korea's national law portal (amended 2 September 2020) sets these criteria for a tourist restaurant:

For a Japanese restaurant, the staffing line is the interesting one. A chef trained in Japan may satisfy (a) or (c): Japan's national cook licence (調理師免許) and a culinary school course in Japan are the obvious candidates. We have not found an official statement on exactly which Japanese certificates the associations accept, so ask the association before relying on one. Keep the original certificate, its translation and proof of the training period ready. MAFF's overseas Japanese cooking skill certification is another document worth having in the file; see our guide to the MAFF certification.

4. How this connects to the E-7

Put the pieces in the right order:

1. Read the current E-7 manual first. Confirm which employer categories are eligible and how the allowance of foreign cooks is calculated for each.
2. Decide whether designation helps. If your restaurant already meets the general foreign cuisine restaurant minimums, designation may add little for E-7 purposes. If it does not, designation may be the more realistic path, depending on what the manual currently says.
3. Apply for designation with a qualifying staff member. The staffing criterion can be met by a Korean cook with the national qualification and 2 years' experience, so designation does not have to wait for the Japanese chef.
4. Then file the E-7. Collect the chef's employment certificates, training records and qualifications, translated, as described in our South Korea guide.

Use a licensed administrative agent (행정사) who handles E-7 cases, and ask for their view of both steps in writing before you spend money on either.

5. Pay floor and local hiring

Korea's minimum wage is national: ₩10,320 an hour in 2026, rising to ₩10,700 from 1 January 2027 (₩2,236,300 a month on a 209 hour basis), according to the Ministry of Employment and Labor. Busan pays the same floor as Seoul.

Local candidates still come first. Japanese residents with permanent or family based status, chefs on E-7 elsewhere, and working holiday makers all exist in Busan in smaller numbers than in Seoul. Japanese nationals can now take part in the Korean working holiday programme twice, since 1 October 2025 (MOFA). Our Seoul guide covers how to check each group's right to work.

6. Step by step

1. Search locally in Japanese and Korean, and check each candidate's residence status.
2. If you need to hire from Japan, have the current E-7 manual section for occupation 441 read against your restaurant's numbers.
3. If the tourist restaurant category helps, confirm the current Annex 2 criteria with the regional tourism association and apply.
4. Interview and test the chef remotely (see remote skills tests).
5. Collect certificates and translations, and file the E-7 through an administrative agent.

General information gathered from official sources in September 2026, not legal or immigration advice. The tourist restaurant criteria quoted are from the 2020 amendment of Annex 2, and the E-7 structure is from an earlier manual revision; confirm both against current texts with the tourism association, Korean immigration or a licensed administrative agent.