Japanese community in Paris

The Paris Metropolitan Area includes a Japanese community. In 2013 the official number of Japanese residents in Paris was 16,277.

In the early 1960s duty-free shops catering to Japanese visitors opened in Paris. Afterwards businesses catering to longer-term residents opened. The director of the publication Ovni, Bernard Bérnaud, stated that "The number of Japanese coming to live in France was very small until 1965 or even into the 70s." In 1991 Jessica Rutman of Look Japan stated that due to the economic status of Japan, the Japanese migrants did not stoke nationalist tensions brought out by immigrants from Africa and China.

While other Asian ethnic groups arrived in Paris as poor refugees and established clusters of communities such as the Paris Chinatown, in 1995 the Japanese came mainly on relatively short stays and live close to their workplaces. Tatsuio Arai, the first secretary of the Embassy of Japan, Paris (), stated in 1995 that there are few areas in Paris with high concentrations of Japanese residents other than the Maison du Japon, a boarding house for Japanese students. Isabelle Molieux, the manager of a grocery store catering to Japanese expatriates who was quoted in The New York Times, stated in 1995 that she believed the Paris Japanese community is "very individualist" and that they prefer to not publicly assert their Japanese identity but adapt to the culture in Paris, so therefore they are less inclined to live in the same area.

In 2013 Japanese businesspeople tended to settle in rental properties in western Paris and western suburbs of Paris, primarily in the 15th arrondissement and the 16th arrondissement of Paris. In 1991 Japanese tended to live in the 15th and 16th arrondissements and the suburban communities of Boulogne-Billancourt and Neuilly-sur-Seine. Rutman stated that because those areas are expensive, it is an example of Japanese people isolating themselves from the wider community instead of assimilating into French society. Marie Conte-Holm, author of The Japanese and Europe: Economic and Cultural Encounters, wrote that the bus route to and from the Institut Culturel Franco-Japonais – École Japonaise de Paris "essentially determines" where Japanese families with children settle in Greater Paris. The Japanese settle in different areas according to rank, with shachō business executives clustering around Neuilly-sur-Seine, company directors living in Passy, and Japanese of lower socioeconomic ranks living around the Hotel Nikko and in the Left Bank. An area around Neuilly-sur-Seine has the joke name "President's Street" or "Shachō Dōri" (社長通り).

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