Gotcha!

Certificate of EligibilityIt’s here! My Certificate of Eligibility has arrived Saturday morning. It is a single sheet of heavy A5 paper, in nice colours with all my details and the details of the soroban school. And with my photo – also in colour. It’s the first photo I have submitted, not the one I had to resubmit – WHAT?

Anyway, this certificate of eligibility is not the same as a visa, in fact, it’s just a prerequisite for obtaining a proper visa to stay in Japan.Thankfully, I can change my current temporary visa to my visa for cultural activities right here in Kyoto, without leaving the country. That is certainly a plus and makes things easier – or so one could think… Below follows the fourth episode of our drama “Fun With Immigration”.

I went down to the immigration office this morning, with my passport and the certificate of eligibility in my backpack and a huge smile on my face, as you can imagine. I thought I’d show them the papers, they’d say “Great!” and issue the visa without further ado. So, I showed them the passport and the certificate, and I had even brought a new photo just in case, and they said “Great! Now please fill out all these forms!”

It turned out that those are the exact same forms I filled out so painstakingly three weeks ago. No, actually not exactly the same – three weeks ago the header of the form said on the right “Application for Certificate of Eligibility”, this time it says there “For Extension or Change of Status”. Everything else is completely the same. I would only be slightly annoyed by that, I mean, I do have time, but… they also required a form with details about the soroban school and teacher, exactly the same (except for the minor detail mentioned above) that we have given them three weeks ago; and of course it has to include my teacher’s signature…

So much for “without further ado”. It was my teacher’s day off today, so I will spend tomorrow to go see him – again – so we can do some paperwork – again – and then go back to immigration – again – to hand them a stack of papers – again – and hopefully they will process the whole thing as quickly as possible. Again. And I hope that I’ll get my foreigner’s ID as quickly as possible. And the real fun thing about this is, that with said foreigner’s ID in my hands I’ll have to go and register at the ward office responsible for me – which is around the corner of my soroban school, about 45 minutes north from here…

I have come to the conclusion that the whole immigration procedure is part of a sophisticated selection process, in best Darwinian style: Entrance to Japan is permitted only for the most stubborn…