Language policies in Japan have been mainlydiscussed in the context of national provisions and regula-tions regarding the Japanese language, or foreign languageeducation. This paper examines the possible emergence of anew national language policy, embedded in a bilateraleconomic partnership agreement (EPA) signed betweenJapan and Southeast Asian countries. Besides its economicorientation, the EPA encourages and regulates the move-ment of people, in particular migrant healthcare workersfrom the signatory countries. Under the EPA, the migrantsare required to take one year of Japanese language trainingbefore they start working in Japan and are expected to passthe national licensure examinations in the Japanese lan-guage if they wish to continue to work. In order to addressthe EPA as a newly emerging form of language policy, Ifirstly identify three unique features of the EPA: its inter-national outlook, the number of policy actors involved, andits close relationship to Japan’s immigration scheme. Sec-ond, I analyse EPA policy documents, demonstratinganother distinctive feature of the EPA—the representationof language on the ‘policy-paper’ level, with a focus onpreemployment Japanese language training. Third, Iexamine how language training under the EPA is inter-preted and appropriated as a language policy and thepotential influence of language ideologies in those pro-cesses. This paper concludes with a call for more investi-gations from the perspective of language policy andplanning on implicit language policies in Japan and beyond,in particular those embedded in immigration policies.

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• New Form of National Language Policy? The Caseof the Economic Partnership Agreement (EPA) in Japan