Customs Form Differences

Japanese

In an earlier post's comments, there was a discussion about how airline staff often try to "guess" the nationality and language of a person based on their appearance. In other words, if you look Asian and you're on a flight going to/from Japan, you'll probably get greetings from the flight attendants in Japanese and they will attempt to give you customs forms in Japanese. If you don't look Japanese, you get another language. This continues until you correct them and you have a good enough memory to remember your nationality and preference.

The first image shown is the Customs Declaration Form in Japanese. What it doesn't say is that this form is actually for Japanese citizens only. Why? If you look closely at the field underneath the phone number, you'll see that there is a field for 職業 {shokugyō} (occupation), but there is no field for 国籍 {kokuseki} (nationality). In other words, Japan is assumed. Without knowing the nationality, knowing the passport number is not helpful. Compare this to the forms in English, Korean, Simplified Chinese, and Traditional Chinese:

English

Korean

Chinese

Traditional Chinese

As you can see, all of the other forms, except for the Japanese original, have a field to the left of "Occupation" for "Nationality". The Korean and Chinese forms make no such assumption of nationality — which makes sense, as there is more than one country that uses Korean (including parts of China!) and even with Hong Kong slowly adopting  簡体漢字 {kantai kanji} (simplified Chinese sinograms) and Mandarin, more than one country still uses 繁体漢字 {hantai kanji} (traditional Chinese sinograms) besides Taiwan.

In the past, as an alien resident of Japan, I've asked flight attendants for the Japanese version, completed it, and submitted it to customs many times over the years. No flight attendant warned me and no customs officer has ever complained to me that I was using the incorrect form. Perhaps the reason the customs officer does not say anything is because when they are inspecting your customs form & your luggage, they are also inspecting your passport at the same time. They know your nationality. Perhaps knowing your nationality after-the-fact when they collect the form is perhaps not that important?