There are other ways. For example, did you know that You can buy access to America by paying $800,000 to start a business? but the Japanese equivalent is much much much much much much much cheaper. It's called the investor visa.
It's only 35k . any working adult with real career experience in America should be able to have that saved. In previous years, they required you to employ two Japanese citizens. But after COVID they revised the rules to where you don't have to employ anybody.
The only catch, is that your business must make money from Japan. You can't be a digital nomad making money from an American company . But this is actually pretty good for various professionals in accounting, tourism/hospitality, sciences/engineering, etc who can do consulting. And The icing on top of the cake is that your business doesn't have to be profitable for the first two years. But if you manage to get it profitable by the 3rd and maintain it until the 5th year, you get access to living in Japan indefinitely, then you can liquidate your investments and be free .
Another option I've seen a bunch of people use is just transferring to the Japanese division of an American company. This works extremely well for finance and tech, because you can find Goldman Sachs or Google offices in the center of Tokyo.
Your goal is residence, not citizenship. Simply being a productive member of society is enough to get residence.
It's a lot like Canada with a points system where if you are a particularly productive human you can get permanent residence in one or 2 years. A moderately productive human being can get it in 5 years.
They're also temporary residence statuses such as when you get employed by an American firm within Japan, or when you come in as an investor.