I was going to write this awhile ago, but I broke my chair again.\u00a0 They haven’t replaced it yet, but there’s a second hand shop below my apartment, so I bought a real chair there for about $10.\u00a0 It’s so amazing.\u00a0 One of the best decisions I’ve made in my short life.<\/p>\n
The title of this post is pretty vague; this isn’t going to be some kind of guide.\u00a0 Really, I’m just going to describe some of the hoops I had to jump through as a foreigner in the land of the rising sun.\u00a0 Foreigners are called gaijin in Japan, so I’ll use that term from now on.\u00a0 Unlike in the US, the term is not considered offensive, and it’s not uncommon for people and signs to address outsiders as simply ‘gaijin.’<\/p>\n
The first thing I’m going to talk about is gaijin registration.\u00a0 Every gaijin who is staying in Japan more than 3 months has to register at their local ward (There are 23 wards\u00a0in Tokyo, which represent seperate merged cities essentially.\u00a0\u00a0Essentially, this is\u00a0Japan’s version of a city\u00a0hall.)\u00a0office where they’ll eventually be given a card they must carry with them at all times.\u00a0 In other words, Japan’s version of a green card.\u00a0 The more astute of you might notice that I’m not actually going to be in Japan more than 3 months (thanks to the slowness of the government) and therefore didn’t need to go through this registration process.\u00a0 That is true, but it’s about 3000x easier to do anything as a gaijin if you have that nifty little alien registration card.\u00a0 In my case, I needed to open a bank account, which was enough of an impetus to go down to my ward office.<\/p>\n
The process isn’t a horrible one, you take 2 recent photographs and your passport down to the office and they guide you a long in the process.\u00a0 The person who helped me didn’t know English so it was also a fun time to practice my broken Japanese.\u00a0 It takes 2 weeks to make your cards so when you’re done they tell you to come back.\u00a0\u00a0If you need certification quickly, you can apply for a “Certificate of Registered Particulars” which is a notarized copy of all your information that you can get immediately.\u00a0 The entire process takes about 20 minutes and the card itself is free. (The certificates cost 300 yen a pop.)<\/p>\n
An interesting part of this process is acquiring passport type photos.\u00a0 A general rule of thumb is that you should always bring a number of these photos with you whenever you go overseas, but I didn’t.\u00a0 Luckily, Japan is the capital of automation, and every major train station has one or more photo taking booths.\u00a0 Some even have English language guidance, which is good if you’re not up on your Japanese photography vocabulary.\u00a0 It was 600 yen for 6 pictures so it’s pretty cheap and super convenient.<\/p>\n
That’s actually the only required thing you have to do to be a foreigner in Japan.\u00a0 The hard part is doing the things that everyone’s required to do, but that only Japanese people know about.\u00a0 To help with this, the ward office hands out useful guides which are written in 4 different languages and explain all the things you need to know to survive in this crazy land.<\/p>\n
I was also going to talk about opening a bank account, but it doesn’t fit in that well since that was a requirement of my job and not of Japan.\u00a0 Maybe I’ll include that story in a future post about signing up for Japanese services.\u00a0 In response to reader Darrel, my next post will be about my living conditions and amenities.\u00a0 You already know I break their chairs; tune in next time to see what else I break. \ud83d\ude09<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
I was going to write this awhile ago, but I broke my chair again.\u00a0 They haven’t replaced it yet, but there’s a second hand shop below my apartment, so I bought a real chair there for about $10.\u00a0 It’s so amazing.\u00a0 One of the best decisions I’ve made in my short life. The title of […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[],"tags":[33,34,4,32],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/erekspeed.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/33"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/erekspeed.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/erekspeed.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/erekspeed.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/erekspeed.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=33"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/erekspeed.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/33\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/erekspeed.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=33"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/erekspeed.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=33"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/erekspeed.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=33"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}