For most foreign families considering a move to Osaka, the school decision quietly becomes the decision around which everything else organizes itself. The neighborhood you'll live in, the kind of apartment or house you'll rent or buy, the budget you'll need, the timing of your relocation, even the visa status that works best for your situation — all of it ends up flowing back to the same starting question: where will the children go to school?
That question is more complex in Osaka than most arriving families expect. Compared to Tokyo, where the international education ecosystem is dense and saturated, Osaka has a smaller and more selective set of options — supplemented by a stronger Kobe-based offering that many Osaka families end up using. The catchment logic is different, the admission timelines run on calendars that don't match the Japanese rental year, and the cost structure includes line items that rarely appear on the school websites until you're well into the application process.
This guide walks through what international schooling in Osaka actually looks like for foreign families: which schools matter, how admission really works, what it costs, where families end up living, and why the whole equation is harder to sort out from abroad than it appears. The goal is not to give you a checklist for handling everything yourself — it's to give you a clear enough picture of the system that you understand what your real choices are, and what kind of help is worth having on your side.
The first thing to understand is that the relevant geography for international schooling is not Osaka the city — it's Kansai, the broader region that also includes Kobe, Kyoto, and the residential corridors that run between them. Osaka itself has a small number of accredited international schools. Kobe has more, partly because Kobe has been a port city open to foreign residents since the late 19th century, and the international school infrastructure there grew up alongside that history. For families who land in Kansai with school-age children, "where to send the kids" is rarely a purely Osaka question.
This matters from day one because it changes the shape of the housing search. A family that decides on a Kobe-based school will typically want to live somewhere along the Hanshin or JR Kobe Line corridor — perhaps Ashiya, Mikage, Okamoto, or central Kobe itself — even if one parent commutes into Osaka for work. A family that goes with the largest Osaka international school will want to live in the northern suburbs, near the Senri Hills area. A family that opts for a smaller central school in Tennoji will be looking somewhere completely different. Three families with the same nominal employer in Umeda can end up living in three entirely different parts of Kansai depending on the school decision.
The other thing to know about the regional landscape is that supply is genuinely limited. The major international schools in Kansai do not have the kind of headcount flexibility you might find in Tokyo, where a school can sometimes find a place for a child mid-year if the parents are persistent. In Kansai, popular grades fill, waitlists form, and admissions departments will be polite but firm about timing. This is the single most underestimated risk for families relocating to Osaka — assuming that finding a school is the easy part and the housing is the hard part. The reality is often the opposite.
The set of schools that foreign families in Osaka actually consider is narrower than a generic search suggests. Below is an honest map of the realistic options, with what each school is best understood as and the kind of family it tends to attract.
OIS is the default starting point for most foreign families relocating to Osaka. Located in Mino, in the Senri area north of Osaka city, the school is K-12, IB-accredited (offering the Primary Years Programme, Middle Years Programme, and Diploma Programme), and shares a campus and several facilities with Senri International School (SIS), its Japanese counterpart. The student body is genuinely international, the curriculum is in English, and the school has the institutional weight that comes with decades of operation.
Practically speaking, OIS is the school whose existence shapes the residential geography of foreign families in northern Osaka. If your child is enrolled at OIS, you are almost certainly going to be living in the Senri Hills area, in nearby Toyonaka or Suita, or further into the corridor that runs north from central Osaka. The school is not particularly close to a major station and is most easily reached by car, school bus, or a combination of subway plus walk depending on where you live.
OIS tends to attract corporate transferees, diplomatic families, families of professionals at multinational firms, and a smaller number of internationally-minded Japanese families. The application process is competitive in some grades and considerably easier in others, but it is never something to leave to the last few weeks before arrival.
The YMCA International School is the main central-Osaka international option for younger children. Located in the Tennoji area, it operates as an IB Primary Years Programme school for elementary-age students and continues through middle-school grades. It is smaller than OIS and has a different character — more locally embedded, less corporate, more accessible by public transport.
For families who do not want to live in the northern suburbs, who have younger children, and who place a premium on living centrally in Osaka, YMCA is the school that makes the equation work. It will not be the right fit for every family, particularly those needing high school grades, but it has built a real reputation among the central-Osaka foreign community, and the location opens up neighborhoods like Tennoji, Abeno, and Uehonmachi as plausible places to live.
If you are leaning toward this school, our guide to finding an apartment in Tennoji covers the residential reality of that area in detail.
Osaka has a long-established Korean community and several Korean schools, including options that operate fully in Korean and others that run dual-language programs. There are also Chinese international schools in the region, most prominently the Osaka Chinese School. These institutions serve specific communities extremely well and are sometimes overlooked by Western families, but for families with cultural or linguistic ties to those communities, they can be the right answer in a way that more generic English-language international schools cannot match.
For families exploring this segment, neighborhood considerations also shift. Areas with strong Korean community presence — Tsuruhashi being the most prominent — take on a different significance. Our article on renting in Tsuruhashi gives the residential picture of that part of Osaka.
This is the section that most families relocating to Osaka discover later than they should. Several of Kansai's strongest international schools are located in Kobe, and many families who initially planned to live in Osaka end up either commuting their children to Kobe or relocating to the Kobe side of the corridor entirely.
The most established options include Canadian Academy on Rokko Island, a K-12 IB World School with a long international reputation; Marist Brothers International School, a Catholic K-12 school with a similarly long history; Saint Michael's International School, a smaller elementary-focused school for younger children; and Deutsche Schule Kobe International for German-curriculum families. Together they constitute the largest concentration of international schooling in western Japan outside of Tokyo.
The implications for housing are significant. Families who choose a Kobe-based school typically end up living in Ashiya, Okamoto, Mikage, or central Kobe — desirable neighborhoods with strong international communities, good access to mountains and sea, and a slightly different rhythm of daily life than central Osaka. The trade-off is that one or both parents may end up commuting into Osaka for work, which is genuinely manageable on the JR Special Rapid (about 20-25 minutes from Sannomiya to Osaka station) but adds a layer of logistical thinking.
For families starting to think seriously about the Kobe option, our guide to Kobe real estate for foreign nationals walks through the specifics of that market.
A growing third category sits between the international schools and conventional Japanese schools: Japanese schools that offer English-language tracks, bilingual programs, or international streams within an otherwise Japanese institutional framework. These options are typically less expensive than fully international schools, often have stronger Japanese-language outcomes, and can work very well for families planning to stay in Japan long-term or for bicultural households where Japanese fluency is a priority.
The fit is not for everyone. Families who expect their children to return to a Western university system in a few years generally find the alignment with international curricula at OIS or the Kobe schools more straightforward. Families thinking in terms of a longer horizon — or who want their children to function comfortably in Japanese society at a level that purely English-language schools rarely achieve — sometimes find these bilingual options to be the better answer.
Increasingly, families relocating to Osaka are arriving with a working plan that doesn't depend on a brick-and-mortar international school at all. Online schools accredited in the United States, the United Kingdom, or Australia have become more sophisticated, and some families combine online schooling with local Japanese activities, language tutors, and supplementary in-person programs.
This route is genuinely viable for some profiles — particularly digital nomad families, families on shorter assignments, or families whose children are in upper secondary grades and self-directed enough to manage the structure. It is not a magic solution. The social dimension of school is harder to replicate, and Japanese visa categories vary in how they treat school-age children outside formal Japanese education. But for families who would otherwise be priced out of international schooling or unable to find a place at one, it has become a real option worth considering rather than a fallback.
Most arriving families underestimate two things about international school admissions in Kansai: how early the meaningful work needs to start, and how much of the outcome depends on factors that look administrative but are actually substantive.
The major schools — OIS, Canadian Academy, Marist Brothers — have annual application cycles that are largely complete several months before the August-September school year starts. Applications typically include academic records from previous schools, teacher recommendations, English-language assessments for non-native speakers, interviews (often via video for families still abroad), and in some cases trial visits or assessment days. Families who begin the process two months before arrival are not generally in a position to negotiate; they take what is available, if anything is available.
What is also rarely visible from outside is that grade-by-grade availability fluctuates sharply. A school may have plenty of room in Grade 4 and a long waitlist in Grade 6 within the same year. Specific learning support needs, English-language proficiency, sibling enrollment status, and corporate sponsorship arrangements (some employers have institutional relationships with specific schools) all affect the decision in ways that the public application materials don't make obvious.
The honest implication is that for families with school-age children, the decision tree is: school first, neighborhood second, apartment third — not the other way around. Locking in a school place before locking in housing is the only way to avoid the situation where you've signed a two-year lease in the wrong part of Kansai.
The published tuition fees on international school websites are the start of the cost conversation, not the end. For the major K-12 schools in the region, total annual cost per child — once tuition, capital fees, building or development levies, technology fees, lunch programs, transportation, uniforms, and required supplies are all included — typically lands in the ¥2.5 million to ¥3.5 million range. For upper secondary grades, particularly with the IB Diploma Programme, the upper end is the more realistic figure.
A few specific cost categories tend to surprise arriving families:
For corporate transferees on a comprehensive expat package, school fees are often partially or fully covered by the employer. For self-funded families, entrepreneurs, and remote workers, the cost is real and worth modeling carefully against the broader cost of living. Our overview of whether Osaka is actually expensive to live in provides useful context for setting overall expectations.
Here is one of the most operationally important details that almost no one tells arriving families: the international school calendar in Kansai does not match the Japanese rental calendar.
International schools in Kansai operate on a Northern Hemisphere academic year. The school year typically starts in mid-to-late August and ends in early-to-mid June. This means that families arriving for the start of school are arriving in mid-summer — a hot, humid, and operationally awkward time to move in Japan.
The Japanese rental market, however, is structured around a completely different rhythm. The peak rental cycle in Japan runs from late February through April, aligned with the Japanese fiscal and academic year (which begins in April). Inventory is at its highest in February and March, prices are most competitive then, and the vast majority of new properties hit the market in that window. By summer — exactly when international school families need housing — inventory has thinned, the best units are gone, and what remains is often what didn't move during the spring cycle.
This is not theoretical. Families arriving in late July or August for an August school start consistently find a smaller and weaker pool of available rentals than they would have found four months earlier. The implications cascade: rushed decisions, settling for second-choice neighborhoods, longer commutes than planned, and sometimes lease terms that look reasonable on paper but get expensive when school timing doesn't align with renewal dates. Our article on how to renew or break a lease in Japan goes into the structural reality of those terms in detail.
The practical consequence is that families relocating for an August school start should ideally be securing housing in March, April, or May — well before they physically arrive. This is operationally challenging from abroad and is one of the most common reasons families end up working with a broker who can run the search and conduct viewings on their behalf.
The school you choose largely determines the residential geography of your life in Kansai. The patterns are reasonably consistent.
For OIS families: the Senri Hills area is the gravitational center. Senri-Chuo, Senri-Yamada, Esaka, Ryokuchikoen, and the broader Toyonaka and Suita corridor host a substantial international family community built around the school's catchment realities. Some families live further south — in Umeda, Nakatsu, or central Osaka — and rely on school bus or commuter trains, but the closer-in suburbs offer the easiest daily logistics.
For YMCA Tennoji families: the central-eastern band of Osaka is the relevant zone. Tennoji itself, Abeno, Uehonmachi, Tanimachi, and the Uemachi plateau more broadly. These are denser, more conventionally Japanese-urban neighborhoods than the northern suburbs, and they appeal to families who want central living with school access.
For Kobe-based schools: Ashiya, Mikage, Okamoto, Rokko Island, and central Kobe (around Sannomiya and Kitano) form the residential heartland. This is widely regarded as some of the most pleasant family living in western Japan — proximity to mountains, sea, established international community, good infrastructure — and prices reflect that.
For families with a working parent commuting into central Osaka while children attend a Kobe school: the Hanshin and JR Kobe Line corridor between Sannomiya and Osaka — Ashiya, Nishinomiya, Amagasaki for some — offers the practical compromise.
Our guide to the top 10 best Osaka neighborhoods for expats and our broader piece on where foreigners actually live in Osaka are good companion reading once school constraints are understood. Our article specifically on renting in Osaka as a couple or family walks through the dimensions of family-appropriate housing in detail.
Property listings in Japan show distance to the nearest train station, often expressed in walking minutes. They do not show what matters most to families with school-age children: how the journey to school actually works, day after day, in the rain, in the heat of August, with a tired six-year-old at 7:45 in the morning.
OIS, for example, is not adjacent to a major station. Even families living "near" the school in Senri rely on a combination of school bus pick-up points, walking, or driving. Listings near Senri-Chuo station may technically be a five-minute walk from the metro but a twenty-minute logistics chain from the school gate. Canadian Academy on Rokko Island is similarly disconnected from the most convenient train stations and depends heavily on the school bus network. YMCA in Tennoji is more centrally located, but the apartments closest to it are not necessarily the apartments most appropriate for families.
What this means in practice is that the right way to evaluate a property is not "how close is it to the station" but "how does the morning school run actually work from this address." Families who don't think this through end up moving — or carrying a chronic logistical burden that wears them down over a school year.
For families relocating from abroad with limited ability to walk neighborhoods themselves, this is one of the strongest arguments for working with a broker who knows the school routes and the practical realities behind the listing photos. Maido Estate has worked with enough family relocations to recognize the specific addresses where the morning logistics work and the addresses where they don't, regardless of how good the apartment looks on paper.
For families who are confident about a multi-year stay in Kansai, the rent-versus-buy question becomes a real one. International school enrollment is itself a stability anchor — once a child is settled in a school, families tend to stay longer than they originally planned. This changes the financial logic of housing decisions.
For families with the financial capacity, buying a family home in the Senri area, in Ashiya, or in central Kobe can make sense over a five-to-ten-year horizon, particularly given the comparatively favorable yen environment for foreign-currency earners. The transaction is more complex than in many Western markets — Japanese real estate operates on its own logic — but it is genuinely accessible to foreign buyers. Our guides to how the Japanese real estate market actually works, buying property in Japan without a mortgage, and buying a premium property in Osaka cover the substantive parts of that decision.
For families who may move on after the school cycle, or who want flexibility, renting remains the right answer — and the family-appropriate rental segment in Senri, Tennoji, and the Kobe corridor has its own dynamics that differ meaningfully from the studio and 1LDK markets that dominate central Osaka. Larger apartments (3LDK and up), houses, and tower mansion units come with different application processes, different landlord expectations, and different price structures. Our overview of tower mansion living in Osaka is relevant for families considering that segment, and our piece on furnished apartments in Osaka is useful for families managing the gap between arrival and finding their long-term home.
For families buying with the intention of returning home eventually, rather than holding the property as an investment, our article on property management in Japan for non-resident owners addresses what happens after the move-out.
Family relocations are the kind of move where the cost of a wrong decision is highest. Sign a lease in the wrong neighborhood and your child has a long, draining commute for two years. Choose a school without understanding the housing implications and you may discover that the residential market doesn't have what you need by the time you arrive. Time the move around the wrong calendar and you take what's available rather than what's right. The system is not hostile to foreign families, but it is unforgiving of decisions made without the right information.
What we do at Maido Estate, specifically for families relocating with school-age children, looks like this:
None of this requires that you have all the answers when you reach out. Most of the families we work with start the conversation when they're still figuring out which school to apply to. That's the right time to start.
International schooling in Osaka, taken seriously, is not a separate problem from your housing search — it's the same problem, viewed from a different angle. The school you choose decides where you should live. The schedule of the school year decides when your housing search needs to happen. The cost structure of the schools decides what the rest of your budget looks like. And the practical realities of getting a child to and from school every morning decide which specific addresses, within the right neighborhood, will actually work for your family.
The good news is that Kansai has genuinely good options. OIS has educated generations of internationally-mobile children. The Kobe schools are among the best in western Japan. The smaller central-Osaka options serve their communities well. The neighborhoods that orbit these schools include some of the most pleasant family living in Japan — Ashiya, Mikage, Senri Hills, the Uemachi plateau. Foreign families do build full and rooted lives here. The question is whether you arrive into a setup that works or one that requires fixing.
If you would like to understand what is realistically possible for your specific situation — your school preferences, your timeline, your budget, your family composition — that's the conversation Maido Estate exists to have. Reach out for an initial discussion. There is no obligation, no sales pitch, and the goal is a clearer picture of what your move would actually look like rather than a generic answer.
For French-speaking families, our companion article vivre à Osaka en tant que Français covers the broader context of the move from a French-speaking perspective. For families weighing the larger Tokyo-versus-Osaka question before locking in a school region, our analysis of Osaka vs Tokyo as cities to move to may also be useful.
Maido Estate is an independent real estate agency based in Osaka, specializing in helping foreign nationals rent, buy, and invest across the Kansai region. We work regularly with relocating families and understand the specific constraints that come with school-aged children. All cost ranges and program details in this article reflect 2026 market and institutional conditions, and should be confirmed directly with the schools concerned.
