Help with a visa extension
How unseen office work is a great blessing
Last year in October I was talking to a graduate student, who was job hunting in Japan and as he said “I need to extend my visa for this,” I suddenly remembered—I had to check when my visa was running out! With shaking hands I pulled out my Resident’s Card and read “January 2020.” Phew, still three months away. But I knew I needed to get started with the visa extension process, soon.
I had no idea how to go about this as I had never extended a visa before. I rang one missionary who said, “It’s a long time ago since I did that because we have permanent residency now, but you can ask Hisako (who does our mission’s finance work) she’ll tell you what you need.” I did.
The next day, I got an email from Hisako with a check list in German of what you need for the visa extension. It also explained where you need to go. There was a list of documents from A-E and she wrote, “I’ll take care of most of this, you only need to get document D from the city office.” She also wrote the name of the document in Japanese.
So I went to the city office, pointed to the written kanji, and they nodded—“Go to the second floor, counter A.” I went and about 10 minutes later had the document I needed.
One week later I got a big envelope with all the other necessary documents from Hisako. It had a detailed description of what these documents were, where I still needed to fill in something, and where it was not necessary.
With all these documents in my hand, I went to the immigration office. At the reception desk I said that I wanted to extend my visa. The worker there started collecting the necessary documents from different drawers. She handed them to me and said, “Please fill this out.”
I gave her the documents I had brought with me, saying, “I already prepared all of this.”
She told me I could go directly to the second floor where I had to pull a number. I got 2160 and saw the current number was 2005. I thought: Oh, a long wait!
As I sat down, the lady next to me said, “Look I have number 2011 but I don’t need it anymore because I have already got everything done, would you like to have it?”
WHAT? “Thank you!”
Number 2011 was called soon after and I submitted all the necessary papers. I was out of the building about 20 minutes after I entered it—thanks to a kind lady and the preparation work of Hisako.
About a week later I got a postcard saying that I could pick up my new visa. I’m so thankful to Hisako—because of her help I could devote myself more fully to my student work and Japanese study.