Re: [tlug] From an enthusiast TLUG follower

[Edward Middleton <edward.middleton@example.com>]

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