Mailing List Archive


[Date Prev][Date Next][Thread Prev][Thread Next][Date Index][Thread Index]

Re: [tlug] From an enthusiast TLUG follower



On 28/8/20 9:31 am, Stuart Luppescu wrote:
On Thu, 2020-08-27 at 17:18 +0900, Stephen J. Turnbull wrote:
The difference between politicians and bureaucrats is not the absence
of heart or presence of cruelty.  The difference is that the
bureaucrat keeps her job by being honest and consistent about it, and
the politician keeps his by being dishonest and inconsistent about it.

Yes, that's a reasonable point. But my objection is the rigid, inhumane
method of enforcing those rules, without exception. (You call it
"honest and consistent"; I call it "inflexible, inhumane and rigid".)
My wife and I returned to Japan together; I was turned away, she was
let it (because of her citizenship), effectively breaking us up and
keeping me away from our children as well. I admit that our thinking
that the immigration officials would not work to break up our family
was too much 甘え but still. When we arrived at Narita, they swabbed our
noses for the PCR test. My wife's test came back negative a few days
later. They didn't even process my swab. They didn't care about whether
I was positive or negative for SARS-CoV-2 or not, belying their claim
that the strict immigration rules come from a desire to not spread
COVID-19. I was willing to quarantine myself for the 14 days or
whatever, but they were more concerned with "honest and consistent"
enforcement of the rules.

I think its just the immigration office in Japan. I have always found the ward office, tax office and health insurance to be really helpful.

My experience with emigration has been fairly consistently bad. When I first moving to here (20 years ago) after all required paperwork was lodged by my sponsoring company they insisted they needed some supplemental documentation (had to be original) and it had to be lodged by the end of the week. I sent it the next day international delivered at great expense and it somehow didn't arrive in time and I was delayed starting by 6 months.

Renewing my work visa the forms directs you to fill all fields in the application form. As 90% of the form was education and work history which hadn't changed I asked whether this was necessary to which I was told it was. After the 2+ hour wait to lodge the forms they berate me for wasting their time filling out details that hadn't changed.

At the time I felt luck because the Chinese students before me had been told they could lodge without particular paperwork that could not be produced before there visa expired and then after waiting 2+ hours, were told they couldn't lodge anything without it, and as a result there would not even be a record they had taken action to apply for renewal.

The biggest benefit of permanent residence seems to be not having to regularly deal with the emigration office.

Edward


Home | Main Index | Thread Index