Of tangential relevance to my previous post, and the highly tangential references to the 1899 Nationality Law in the comments section, is the news that Charles Jenkins was just granted permanent residency. I think it is fair to say that the fact that it was announced personally by Justice Minister Kunio Hatoyama shows that he received special treatment (after all, would a retired man with no education normally meet the standard?) but in his case I think the double standard is acceptable.
13 thoughts on ““Jenkins cleared for residency””
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Why is it acceptable? Why can’t he live on a renewable visa like everyone else?
I must admit, there was a part of me annoyed at special treatment, but after thinking about it some more, I couldn’t sustain the feeling. His case is so bizarre that I think in some ways he almost deserves to be given quasi-refugee treatment more than looked at as an ordinary immigrant.
The only category of renewable visa he would realistically qualify for is a spouse visa (which I assume is what he’s had so far), and in the very possible event that his wife died he would lose his visa and be deported. You could make an argument that his special celebrity and status as a diplomatic token in regards to North Korean might fulfill the requirement of contributing to Japan, and his memoir probably gave him enough enough money to qualify for financially independent, so that really only leaves the period of residence to be waived- and I think considering his age, health, and life history it isn’t so unreasonable to preemptively immunize him from sudden deportation due to such circumstances as spousal death. Of course, it would be better to change the way the law works so that it’s fairer for everyone (in particular refugees who escaped from conditions similar to Jenkins), but why not give a break to a guy that spent most of his life as a prisoner in North Korea?
I’m pretty sure that a spouse visa is valid for its stated duration even if your spouse dies or you get divorced (see question 18 here). Jenkins’s wife would almost certainly have lived long enough for him to renew his spouse visa (which I believe, based on media reports, was due to come up very soon), and with another couple of years on that he would be eligible for PR under the letter of the law as a five-year spouse resident.
Anyway, that’s all legal otakuism and it isn’t worth going too far out on a tangent again.
I think the big issue here has to do with that last statement about changing the way the law works.
Permanent residency is a real pain in the butt to obtain. Guys like Roy and me would have to sit in Japan for ten years before getting it (Adamu gets a break thanks to his Japanese wife). Living in Japan as a foreigner without permanent residency is an even bigger pain in the butt, what with all the immigration formalities and niggling bureaucratic issues. For instance, my current visa expires at the end of the summer, and I almost wasn’t allowed to change mobile phone providers because I had less than 90 days left! And let’s not even start with credit cards and mortgages and re-entry permits.
I am pretty sure that if Jenkins were not a darling of the news media, he would not be getting special treatment, all those years in North Korea notwithstanding. There are hard luck cases all over this country that end in a final “sho ga nai” shafting, as any number of Debito’s commenters would be happy to tell you. Instead of giving one well-known case special treatment and continuing to screw the rest of us over, they should be fixing the very systemic flaws which Jenkins’s case is highlighting.
“Permanent residency is a real pain in the butt to obtain. Guys like Roy and me would have to sit in Japan for ten years before getting it (Adamu gets a break thanks to his Japanese wife). Living in Japan as a foreigner without permanent residency is an even bigger pain in the butt, what with all the immigration formalities and niggling bureaucratic issues. For instance, my current visa expires at the end of the summer, and I almost wasn’t allowed to change mobile phone providers because I had less than 90 days left! And let’s not even start with credit cards and mortgages and re-entry permits.”
Spouse helps in my experience. It’s easy after that.
Immigration practically forces you to apply.
I`m also a bit worried about PR.
I don`t work in Japan (foreign university) but I spend about 4-5 months of each year here. My (Japanese) wife and I want to live in Japan when I retire, but I would likely, under the curret rules, face the boot if she passed away before I.
I`m sure that the rules will be different in 30 years but…. at the present I have a PhD in a Japan area, Japanese ability, thinking about buying property here, etc. and I still wouldn`t get the break that Jenkins (and seriously, his only real connection to Japan has been a virtual `jail marriage` to a Japanese woman – do they communicate in a combination of broken English and broken Korean?) has.
Jenkins case sure reminds me of Alberto Fujimori.There was a harsh criticism among lawyers who do the immigration cases on Fujimori’s assylum.
Anyway,I wouldn’t worry much about your 30 years or so future,M-Bone.And even after your wife passed away first,of which I don’t think it will be happening considering Japanese women lives longer than anybody on earth,you are still the spouse to the Japanese national on paper.
Well, as it happens the government announced a couple of weeks ago that they plan to change the law. From what little I heard, the proposal seems as if it would make gaining permanent residence far easier. How serious does the plan seem to be?
“And let’s not even start with credit cards and mortgages and re-entry permits.”
Speaking of which:
When I left Japan last year I still had 2 years left of a 3 year work visa, so I just kept the Alien Registration Card instead of handing it back. Then in February when I decided I would accept the scholarship to study here I applied for a student visa in New York, got it in my passport, they stamped the old visa and re-entry permit as “VOID” and then when I came back to Japan in April I entered as a new entrance, not a re-entry.
Then I was staying at a friend’s house down in Fushimi, so I took my old ARC to the ward office to register change of address and I asked the guy (who, incidentally, was wearing lavender pants and a multi colored polka dotted shirt, and spoke/gestured in a completely stereotypical flaming gay fashion, and asked me if I had met “the bitch” who works in the same counter of the Sakyoku ward office) if I should change my on the card from my old job to my new school, and he said not to bother.
So I went to apply for a reentry permit on Thursday, and the immigration officer tells me that even though my old reentry permit was stamped VOID in New York, it was still marked as valid in the computer system so they couldn’t give me a new one unless I went to the ward office and requested a new card, with a new registration number. So I went to the Sakyoku ward office to apply for it, and the lady there (not, I presume, “the bitch”) told me that I should never have been using the old card, and the guy in Fushimi should have known to have me apply for a new one instead of just changing my registered address. So, I applied for a new card, and apparently all of the registration data associated with the former card over the past 3.5 months was expunged from the system, retconing me into a non-person for that period. I haven’t had a chance to get back to Immigration yet, but I THINK it should be OK now.
But I do want to say, despite all of the annoyances in Japan’s immigration system, it is probably STILL better than anywhere else in Asia with the possible exceptions of Singapore and Hong Kong. “It could be worse” is, of course, no excuse for not improving something, but it is worth keeping some perspective.
At the risk of going off on another tangent: Fushimi Boy was being lazy or possibly just confused. What you “should” have done if you wanted to keep using the old ARC and re-entry permit would have been to come back to Japan as a re-entrant on your old visa, and then file with the Immigration Bureau to change your residence status from worker-bee to student. (I think you might even be able to do this remotely.) That would have the added bonus of letting you count all the time in the interim toward a naturalization or PR application, not that you have any interest in either of those things.
Each time you get a visa overseas and enter on a new residence status, you are more or less reborn from the government’s standpoint, so you have to do all your government-related procedures over again. (This is why they ask you to return your ARC when you’re leaving the country “for good.” It gets destroyed and your alien registration history gets sent to a maximum-security vault somewhere in the bowels of the Ministry of Justice.)
I once had a really aggravating experience trying to de-register a car whose foreign owner had bought the car, registered title, moved, then left Japan and returned on a new visa. Even though his name and date of birth matched the information on the vehicle registration, the addresses didn’t match, and the move was only documented on his old alien registration papers which had long since been consigned to the GOJ bunker. It took a lot of arguing and a few bureaucratic hacks to get everything sorted out.
On a happy note, the Japanese spouse visa is very, very good. My recent gaijin card processing also went very well – about 10 minutes after going to the desk at city hall, I had a paper vision (with the physical card coming in a week or so). My country does not have a spouse visa which means that it is PR or nothing — and a three year period where they restrict your right to freely leave the country. A PR application also costs close to 100,000 yen, which is nuts and must be absolutly punishing for low income people.
“What you “should” have done if you wanted to keep using the old ARC and re-entry permit would have been to come back to Japan as a re-entrant on your old visa, and then file with the Immigration Bureau to change your residence status from worker-bee to student. (I think you might even be able to do this remotely.)”
I thought of that, but unfortunately it isn’t allowed. One of the conditions of the monbusho scholarship is actually that you ENTER the country on a student visa, which you have to get at the same consulate in your home country where you initially applied for the scholarship (they also fast track the application, and exempt you from fees, which is nice).
Blech. I wonder why they structured things that way. Is it just ordinary bureaucratic stiffness, or are they actively discouraging the inbound scholars from becoming too established in Japan?
`or are they actively discouraging the inbound scholars from becoming too established in Japan?`
The `official point` of the scholarship is that you use what you learn in your home country (and if that is Japan knowledge, the hope is that you will have nice things to say about Japan). This is by no means abnormal. I am a Monbusho vet and was also on a similar scholarship in a country in the English-speaking world where I had to sign something saying that I would NOT attempt to find work in that country and NOT attempt to apply for PR upon finishing my degree.