FAQ: How much paperwork is involved?

Answer: more than any of the other Japanese visas and permanent residency, but probably not as much as you think and not as much as what you've read.

If you go to sites for Japanese immigration lawyers, they're of course going to tell you that the amount of paperwork is insurmountable to do by yourself. No doubt the paperwork is a pain, but I and most people I know did it by ourselves (including permanent residency), so it definitely can be done. The immigration lawyers are trying to sell you their services, so they're going to be naturally inclined to make their document preparation service seem like the best possible value. Furthermore, if you read the fine print on those sites, they promise to try to reduce the amount of personal visits you make to the 法務局 {hōmukyoku} (Legal Affairs Bureau), etc., not eliminate the need for you to do legwork on your own.

The tale of the tape: the picture on the left is a comparison between a naturalization application (200 pages) and a telephone book: The NTT タウンページ {taun pēji} (Town Pages). The picture on the right is a picture of my application, in a 40 sleeve binder (I didn't get points for neatness).

My application on the right side is on top of an opened MacBook Pro, which is about 2cm thick. Now, keep this in mind with my application: each form or set of copies, just like a Japanese bag of candy, is in its own vinyl transparent sleeve, surrounded by a thick hard green case. That's going to add some thickness to it.

The number one cause of application thickness was the copies of my last three (two cancelled) U.S. passports.  My career requires a lot of travel to China, Canada, Silicon Valley, and the U.K., meaning I had a lot of visas and entrance and exit stamps. Two of those U.S. passports were so thick that they required extender page sets (an additional 24 pages) inserted in the middle of a 25 page and a 50 page passport respectively. Each page of the passport that is not blank is supposed to be photocopied (black & white or color), centered in the middle of an A4 piece of paper. And copied twice.

So while my application is indeed about 3cm thick, at least ⅓ of that thickness is copies of my passports, and about ¼ of the thickness is instruction books and the plastic vinyl covers.

Collecting the paperwork isn't difficult, but it is a time suck. You will probably need to take about a half day off of work for each of the following domestic chores:

• Getting copies of your tax records (personal and business)
• Getting copies of your visa records
• Getting copies of your spouse's paperwork (probably two visits)
• Getting copies of your real estate records
• Getting copies of your driving records
• Getting copies of your employment records (though you don't need to take time off of work to do this)

So a total of three and a half days off of work to hoof your way around the city to various government buildings. And that's assuming you're efficient and don't forget anything or need to make second trips.

If you use the electronic fingerprint based (not the same as the fingerprint/photo machines for re-entry permit holders and non-special permanent resident foreigners) 日本国自動化ゲート {Nihon-koku jidōka gēto} (Japan automated gates) at the airport, you will need to apply for a written computer transcript of your country entrances and exits. This is because the automated gate is "unmanned" (actually, in the case of foreigners, not entirely unmanned); it does not leave an entry or exit stamp in your passport from Japan.

I recommend you do this anyway (your entrances and exits to/from Japan are recorded in a database even if you don't use the automated gates): you're going to have to transcribe all of your entrances and exits onto a form in chronological order anyway, and the stamps in your passport are often barely legible, half-stamped, and all over the place in a random order. With a database printout, transcribing the dates makes becomes easier.

The foreign paperwork can probably be done by mail. The foreign paperwork adds heft to your portfolio as it's rarely in standardized sizes; while all the paperwork I had from Japan, with the exception of my wife's 戸籍 {koseki} (family register), was in international paper size A4, the birth certificates and everything from various countries (U.K. and various States in the U.S.) ranged from everything from irregular postcard size to something that was sort of B4 sized (my father's birth certificate from the U.K.)

Translating all the documents takes about a full weekend day if you're quick and use machine translation to pre-translate and then edit afterwords. The translations do not need to be certified or be beautiful works of art. They just need to be good enough to not mislead or omit information and give the bureaucrats a gist of some of the more difficult to understand areas. Translating the abbreviated British military ranks of my father's immediate family turned out to be the biggest challenge for me. (what the heck is a "L.C. T.90482 R.A.S.C. — fishmonger?")

The translations means that the size of the foreign paperwork will multiply by at least two.

On a side note, I should mention that translating the birth certificates and the marriage certificates, some of them being over a half a century old, was a fascinating history lesson in civil rights advancements in Japan, the southern U.S. states, and the U.K. Some of the line items on those old birth certificates and marriage certificates are considered non-politically correct or irrelevant at best and discriminatory at worst today.