plans and preparations – Page 17

Shipping

I have received word that my boxes containing all my belongings, which have been stored in Hamburg for more than two years now, have left Germany with destination Japan yesterday. The estimated date of arrival in Kobe port will be September 19. Adding another week or so for customs clearance (I hope everything will work out smoothly), I should receive all my belongings by the end of September.

I am quite excited about this, but also a bit worried. Now, my apartment is almost empty, which gives me lots of space, a good feeling – and hardly anything to clean. This will change drastically when I start unpacking. Finally, I will have all my things back, like my winter clothes and thick duvets, all my beloved books that I did not give away, but also a full set of cutlery and dishes, and all my cooking utensils.

But it also means that I will have to deal with all those things, will have to store them somewhere in my apartment which does not have that much storage space. How many new cupboards and shelves and other furniture will I need? How much of that wonderful empty space will be left once I have finally put everything away?

Yet another step to becoming an adult, I guess. Will I ever arrive at that place?

Time Off

Kyoto has become very hot the last week or so, with temperatures around 35 degrees Celsius during the day and some 25 in the night. It’s not as bad as it seems, I like it hot and although the humidity is unpleasant, I can survive with all my windows open and a light breeze going through the apartment.

So far the theory. Reality is a bit different though: These days I wake up just after 6 am because that’s the time when the cicadas wake up in the large trees outside my building. I have tried measuring their noise – they are almost as loud as a jackhammer! And when it finally becomes too hot even for them – somewhere around 10 in the morning – the real jackhammers that are used in the construction work on our parking lot are starting up. Which means, in my apartment without aircondition, I have the choice between suffocation due to the heat or madness due to the noise.

As I am not planning to succumb to either, I am taking a week off to visit my friend in Korea. Of course, it will be just as hot there, and there are also cicadas that are equally noisy; but at least her apartment in the 18th floor has properly closing windows to keep the noise out and aircondition…

Hence, there will be no posts next week. I mean, not that there can be anything interesting happening in Kyoto without me anyway… 😉 Please tune in again for my next post on Monday, August 10.

Have a nice summer too!

Patience

With my new visa in place, I can finally start working for my own company. In order to do this properly, I need a bank account for the company, a place to deposit my capital and my earnings and from which to pay my bills and salary.

I have received a rather extensive list of documents needed to open a company account, and I collected and copied them all on Monday. Yesterday in the early afternoon – hoping that it would be less crowded – I went to my branch of Kyoto Bank around the corner and thought I could open a new account right away.

However, no such luck… After securing the assistance of the only English-speaking clerk, we sat down and filled in a form: Company name and address, company representative name and address, my name and address, purpose of the account, purpose of the company’s business… etc. I also handed over the prepared documents and my Japanese ID card. When everything was in place the clerk told me that

“Screening will take up to two weeks.” What screening? Well, apparently, in the case of business accounts, it’s not the business choosing the bank, but the bank choosing the business. How they do this I cannot say, after all the required documents are minimal: The teikan incorporation papers – a single page stating business name, address, and initial capital as well as business purpose and representative members – a certificate of the registration of the company inkan – not older than 6 months – and a copy of my zairyu card – probably only because I am a foreigner. Because the clerk also wanted to know the main purpose of the 10 business purposes listed on the teikan, which is a bit difficult to explain, I gave him the (English) business plan I prepared for the Immigration Office. But that’s all of the documents from my big stack that Kyoto Bank wanted to have, and I seriously wonder what they are trying to read out of them; it is a brand new start-up business after all…

As I have never before owned a business account, I can only guess as to why there is a screening at all. Probably because there is bound to be more fluctuation on a business account than on a private one? Because it is easier to slip into the reds? Because the bank will feel more obliged to give a line of credit to a business than to a private person? As I said, I can only guess, and be patient. Again.

Sometimes I think the only thing that’s really needed in Japan is an unlimited amount of patience…

Notification

I have just received the following email from my lawyer.

Iris-san,

Hope this mail finds you well.
I’d like to announce you a great news… Your application has been approved finally! Congratulations!

We have received notification this morning, however, Mr. I. who can receive your new residence card as Immigration Lawyer on your behalf is out of office today for a business trip. So we will go to the Immigration Office to get your new card on Monday morning next week. We don’t know the duration for your new Business Manager visa until we receive the residence card.

I will let you know after posting LetterPack, registered mail enclosing your new card and passport. Please wait for that.

Cheers for your future business in Japan and please enjoy wine or something this weekend!;)

Have a fabulous weekend!

More details next week when I know them myself. And now, off for a good cry…

Morning Sports

Next to my apartment complex there is one of Kyoto City’s departments concerned with garbage collection. Sometimes there are garbage trucks coming and going, but the main part is a mid-sized office building. The people there start working quite early, sometimes I can hear the machines gear up as early as 7:30 in the morning, which can be a bit annoying now that I sleep with open windows…

On top of that, everyday in the morning – except for weekends – at 8:15 am, there is music playing at that company. It took me quite a while to figure out what is going on, and wouldn’t you believe it… they are doing gymnastics! The whole rank and file meet outside – rain or shine – to do something for their health.

I guess, that’s what it is meant to be at least. The exercises are very basic, a bit of stretching, a bit of bending and touching the ground with your fingers,… However, the men exhibit an enthusiasm during the workout that verges on outright refusal. The music does nothing to inspire greatness either: instead of something upbeat to increase the pulse rate, the never-changing piece is reminiscent of a lullaby. Probably the men there (I have yet to see a women exercising) are grateful that it does not take too much of their time: Today I clocked the whole thing, it took less than 3:30 min… What this is supposed to achieve, I cannot fathom. Obviously not an improved health, then group bonding, maybe?

men next door exercising

Coincidentally, I have also started an exercise regime. Given that I live here on the fifth floor without elevator, I would like to be able to get home with my shopping bags without collapsing at my doorstep every time. I have found an easy and at the same time very good exercise program online as part of The Hacker’s Diet. The book – available online for free in various formats; it is copyrighted though! – was written by a computer programmer (John Walker, inventor of AutoCAD) and focuses on permanent weight loss. However, he has one chapter on exercising as well, and while he says this alone is not enough to lose weight, it is always good to improve your stamina.

If you check out the link, you will find that there are only five types of exercises to be done, and the better shape you’re in, the more of them you will have to do. I have started with the introductory ladder about a month ago, and I have just moved on to rung 8. The whole exercising will take you less than 15 minutes no matter how high you are on the ladder (because you’ll get better with time), and it does indeed improve your wellbeing – by now I have all but stopped wheezing when I get home… I have done this exercise regime already before I moved to Japan, but for various reasons… okay, out of sheer laziness, I stopped doing it. However, I am ready again to get in better shape, and to get back up rung 30 where I was once, and this time maybe beyond…

Take this from somebody who never liked sports much: give it a try – it’s worth it!

Anxiety

Tuesday April 28th I – or rather: my lawyer – filed my visa application, and since then I have been waiting for a reply. Usually, this particular visa application can take up to two months, so right now is probably the time to start getting anxious.

stack of papers Finally, yesterday – precisely eight weeks and two days after filing – I received a notification from Immigration. It was short and to the point. Almost a standard form letter. They want yet more documents… Time for another issue of our popular series “Fun with Immigration”!

Let me explain: I have set up my company and explained its main source of income to Immigration. In the business plan, however, I had to be realistic and say that it will take time to establish this source of income until it will become substantial enough to pay all the company’s expenses. Until then, I promised, I would supplement the company’s revenues by doing web design, language teaching etc., and it was very likely that in the beginning this would be the only revenue stream for a while.

My company is set up in a way that I could fish in many different ponds, so as such, these quite divergent types of work are not an issue. However, Immigration found that one sentence in my business plan – the other three pages did not matter – and latched onto it. Essentially they said, okay, that all sounds swell, but you really don’t have much time to get this all going, so we want to know that you can hit the ground running and start making money the minute we’ll give you that visa. In order to prove that, why don’t you give us a list of your clients for the beginning?

A client list. Surely you must be joking? Which part of “I am not allowed to work in Japan with my current visa” do you not understand? How am I supposed to get clients if I’m not allowed to start working right away? Especially language teaching is something which, once you found a good teacher, you would want to start immediately, not in five weeks or whenever that lady is finally legal…

So, I did the only thing possible at this point: I panicked. After all, it’s not as if I could summon clients out of thin air. If I could do such a trick, why not skip the detour and delve straight into producing big wads of cash, complete with paper trail? However, my lawyer talked me down again. I received guidelines and a few examples of what I could do to convince Immigration to give me that visa after all. It will take a few days to neatly write that all up, but I am much more confident now. Once this is done, Immigration should issue the visa without much further delay, according to my lawyer. Let’s hope this is indeed the case…

Tired

Wow, today was a busy day. I had three different appointments in different parts of the city, something I don’t really enjoy doing, partly because I don’t like to see so many people in one day, and partly because I don’t like rushing from one place to another.

In the morning, I had my German-Japanese tandem meeting. It still goes well after more than a year, but I think my Japanese friend is a better student than I am. Today I had a list of things I wanted to ask him – about an advertisement for a sports club nearby and some very specialised vocabulary for my upcoming shopping trip – and we had an interesting misunderstanding about the German word “zu” which often has the meaning of “to” in English (zu tun means to do), but sometimes is also used as a prefix (as in zuhoeren – listen or zusehen – watch). I’m glad we could clear that up in the end.

Afterwards I took the subway to Kyoto station, where Yodobashi Camera is located. I needed a case for the hard drive I had removed from my old laptop, and although I thought I had chosen the correct one (a SATA) there seems to be a tiny variation in the pins that I could not account for. Thus the disk cannot be connected to the case, which means I will have to go back to Yodobashi tomorrow and try to find another one.

Then, I had a very quick lunch with sandwiches from a convenience store and after I had finished, I went to an appointment with another friend of mine. She is a very nice Japanese lady, and although long retired, she has the energy of a teenager. Talking with her – both in English and Japanese – is lots of fun, even if the topic does not centre around men…

Shipping

I have been working on the basics of my company webpage today. Although I am planning nothing spectacularly difficult, I realised that as the whole world (except myself) is now using mobile phones to go online, I would need to catch up with the latest mobile design and programming models, unless I want to become the last dinosaur on the web. Or maybe the first?

Anyway, I decided to throw some money at the problem and to get myself a decent book on the matter. Yes I know how that sounds. Remember: I’m a non-mobile phone owning, actual book reading dinosaur. So, I was browsing a bit and settled on something that seemed reasonable and I can order it from amazon.

Of course, shipping stuff to Japan is prohibitively expensive, you get used to that, but what really riled me up was the estimated duration of the shipping: 3 – 6 weeks. Excuse me, how long? People, it’s a book. One single book! I know that Japan is an island, but I am sure you’re not hiring a personal swimmer even though this would explain the price… Come on people, 6 weeks is ridiculous! Shipping all my 42 boxes from Germany – on a real container ship – will not take longer than that, and yes, my things will have to go through customs as well.

Okay, I thought, let’s look at amazon Japan. I’m glad to say that they have the book too and there they have free shipping, but delivery will take just as long. Obviously they are buying the book in America themselves. I’m deeply sorry I can’t read textbooks in Japanese, although, given the subject matter, half of the book will be English words and phrases anyway.

I have resigned to not buy the book as I wanted to be finished with the site by the time the book should arrive. Although not a big fan of learning things that way, I will look for some tutorials on the web, which will hopefully do the trick. Alternatively, I can always have a look at Kyoto University’s library, I know they have a fairly good English section for the sciences.

Jane Doe

Over the weekend, I have completed the last bits of my visa application, and I have just heard back from my lawyer that they will submit all the documents tomorrow afternoon, if possible.

Now, all I can do is wait… The procedure to change the visa can take up to two months, but the good thing is that I can stay in Japan even if my current visa expires during this time. How fast I would have to leave the country in case the new visa is not granted, I do not know – and I am certainly not keen on finding that out.

But that does not really worry me, I’ll take care of that problem when it arises. I am much more worried about the following: For my lawyer to be able to submit the paperwork on my behalf, I had to give him both my passport and my zairyu card, and he will keep them throughout the application procedure, however long this may take. (*) You know that those two are the only two documents proving that I am who I am, here in Japan…

I find this quite scary, to be honest. Although I have received a “certificate of deposit” that states that both my IDs are with my lawyer and even include photos, stamps, and his mobile number, this is not quite the same. I will try not to run into the police of course, but what if there is some sort of emergency? Besides, not wanting to leave the country is one thing; not being able to, is a completely different thing…(*) Added one day later: Just to clarify: It is not strictly necessary that my lawyer keeps my IDs throughout the screening procedure. He needs them only twice: in the beginning when he is filing the application (proof of application is stapled into the passport, by the way) and in the end when the visa has been approved and he goes to exchange the old zairyu card for the new one. The reason why he wants to keep them is to simplify and speed up the whole procedure, and, yes indeed, I have agreed to this (after some agonising back and forth…).

Endspurt

After my company was established, you would think that I deserved a break from paperwork for a while. Oh no, no such thing. The next goal was to apply for a new visa, one with which I am actually allowed to work for my company…

So, again, I needed to produce yet more paper. Have I already mentioned that the Japanese love paper and paperwork? The more paperwork you’ll give to the authorities, the more sincere they believe you to be… In this vein, I collected a copious amount of documents, the obvious ones like Curriculum Vitae and university degrees, and the interesting ones like various photos of my office space and the nameplates on my door and mailbox as well as the rental contract for my apartment that had to state in writing – and with the hanko of my landlord in place – that I was allowed to use one room as an office for the company.

Slightly vexing was that I had to prove that the start capital of my company was indeed my own money – and how I got to have all that cash. Okay, I can see that if you are buying yourself a visa with that investment, it should be your own assets. Mind you though that it was not good enough that I had transferred the money from my own account back in December last year. First of all, because the magic timeframe for anything in Japan seems to be “within the last three months”, so December was too late – or too early? This is the reason why I needed that second Japanese bank account under my name, so that I could transfer the investment from one account with my name to yet another account with my name… To be fair, even Japanese citizens have to do that if they want to open a company. Anyway, that was not good enough. I still had to show where I got all that money from in the first place, which thankfully was easy.

Today I finished the last piece of paperwork: A business plan and a budget for the next two years. Interestingly, this is something that is only required for the visa application and not for the business establishment itself. I hate writing these sort of self-adulations and extensive accumulations of empty phrases and buzzwords, and to be honest, I have considerably procrastinated on this task. Thanks to a good friend of mine who has experience with running a small business, however, I could push myself over the finish line today.

Now I have some time to rest, and maybe even time to catch up with all my emails… The paperwork is now with my lawyer and he promised to have a look at it in the next few days. With a bit of luck the business plan with its seven pages of manifested blood sweat and tears is satisfactory and we can finally hand in all the collected documents to the immigration office. Let’s hope there will be fewer instances of the drama “fun with immigration” than last year…