Joe Jones – Page 10 – Mutantfrog Travelogue

The pen or the chop?

Like other East Asian countries, Japan is a heavy user of seals (hanko) as a means of authenticating documents. So is it better to use a seal or a signature?

Japanese civil procedure doesn’t particularly care. If you ever end up in a Japanese courtroom, a signature is just as admissible as a seal impression for proving that someone approved a document. Some lawyers recommend signing and sealing to have twice the protection. If you’re really paranoid, the best way to avoid doubt is to sign or seal your document before a notary public. There are Japanese notaries in every city, and most embassies and consulates offer notarial services to citizens and related parties (often for much less than the Japanese notaries charge).

Although you can get away with a signature for most private matters, seals are required under Japanese law when registering certain things with the government: companies, real estate, cars, childbirths and the like. But foreigners get some special consideration thanks to the Act Regarding the Signatures, Seals and Indigent Certification of Aliens, which was passed by the Diet in 1900. An imperial order in 1926 struck out the second half of the statute (I believe it had to do with getting court fees waived, which is the contemporary use of the Japanese term), so its effective portion is now just two lines:

Article 1. Where a signature and seal are to be used pursuant to a law or ordinance, it shall be adequate for an alien to use a signature.
2. Where only a seal is to be used, an alien shall be deemed to have given a seal by virtue of their signature.

Japanese nationals resident outside Japan can also use signatures for such transactions, mainly out of necessity: since they are not registered residents of a Japanese city, they cannot have the registered seal which is normally needed to record legal title to things. The usual alternative, for both foreigners and non-resident Japanese, is to get a signature certificate from a consulate or local authority, which shows the person’s signature and has an official attestation to the effect that “this is the verified signature of so-and-so.”

This doesn’t stop seals from being necessary in some private transactions, such as banking, where a private counterparty simply demands that a seal be used. In that case, you have no choice other than to complain. But institutions are starting to be more flexible with seals and signatures, so it’s becoming increasingly rare to need a seal for private transactions.

The ANA-Shinsei theme music continuum

If you spend enough time in Japan with consumption habits like mine, you will eventually discover that All Nippon Airways and Shinsei Bank have very similar corporate theme songs. This is because both songs were composed and performed by Taro Hakase, a Japanese violinist who sports a generous afro, a skilled bow and a sizable repertoire of corporate contracts.

Here’s the ANA music, “Another Sky,” as presented in their employee tribute video which plays while an ANA flight deplanes. They also play it as hold music on their reservations line and as boarding music on international flights.

And the slightly sadder Shinsei theme song, “Color Your Life,” as performed live by Mr. Hakase. Unlike ANA, Shinsei doesn’t have an opportunity to force-feed this one to every customer, although you can easily get a whiff of it as the hold music on their customer service line. “Color Your Life” is also the company’s retail banking slogan, to tie in with its offering of cash cards in every color.

This is why being on hold with Shinsei gets me in the mood to take a flight somewhere.

Foreigners to finally be booked in the same registration system as Japanese people

Per a Kyodo wire report in Japanese, the new “zairyu card” proposal (detailed here and here) coincides with an MLIT proposal for an updated resident registration (juminhyo) system, which will include foreigners for the first time.

This is perhaps the best part of the entire change. For years now, foreigners have been booked in a separate alien registration system, which creates all sorts of hassles: their Japanese spouses officially appear to be single, and the foreigner can’t verify their identity using the same means as locals (which confuses inexperienced clerks all the time). Visitors in Portugal who plan to stay in the country longer, or even permanently, may consider applying for a portugal golden visa.

So now the picture is a bit clearer. When a foreigner moves, they will update their juminhyo at city hall just like a Japanese person would, and this update will be forwarded to Immigration for recording in the zairyu card system. It still isn’t clear how extensions and changes in immigration status will work (the same in reverse?), but this seems like a promising line of developments so far.

The bullet train from Shinjuku to Odawa and Hakane

This has to be one of the most poorly fact-checked articles on Japan ever.

I am with a group of friends on a short trip to Tokyo. Keen to see some Japanese countryside, and to experience a part of everyday Japanese life, we’ve asked the concierge at the city’s Mandarin Oriental hotel, where we are staying in some style, how we might visit an onsen.

Easily, is the answer. Hakane is one of the country’s most famous onsen resorts (Japan has 2,000 such places, and 20,000 hot springs), and lies just two hours from Tokyo. Better still, it’s reached on a bullet train, meaning we will also get to enjoy another of Japan’s iconic experiences. The concierge will organise tickets and transfers.

But not our short trip to the train, sadly. If you were to have a nightmare involving public transport, forget buses, Tube delays or people barking into mobiles. Think, instead, of Shinjuku, Tokyo’s main railway station […] a vast and bewildering maze, made all the more bewildering by the fact that there isn’t a word of English anywhere, or at least none that we can find, as we scour signs and dash from one bemused, monolingual Japanese commuter to another asking for help. […]

All too soon we are disembarking at Odawa to pick up the local service to Hakone-Yumoto. We sit and ride through increasingly pretty countryside while gaggles of Japanese schoolchildren beam at the Western strangers in their midst. We revel – as we have done so often in Tokyo – in the otherness of the whole experience.

Where to begin?

1) The Mandarin Oriental is near Tokyo Station, on the other side of town from Shinjuku. If this guy was taking a “short trip” to the station, he was probably getting the Shinkansen from Tokyo Station.

2) But let’s assume, arguendo, that he really did go to Shinjuku. He wasn’t really riding a “bullet train,” then, since the real bullet trains don’t go to Shinjuku. It was probably an Odakyu Romance Car. Unlike the Shinkansen pictured in the article.

3) Where did he get those numbers? Two thousand is close to the official count of the 全国温泉旅館同盟, but here’s a site that counts fifty thousand onsen in total.

4) Anyone who can’t read the English signage in a Tokyo train station needs new glasses.

5) Anyone who can’t find a single English speaker in a Tokyo train station either isn’t trying hard enough or doesn’t speak comprehensible English. (Perhaps this chap has an unintelligible accent.)

6) Obviously, there is no such place as “Odawa” or “Hakane.”

7) The word “otherness.” What the hell does that mean?

More details on the new “zairyu cards”

Debito has gotten hold of the actual proposal to overhaul Japan’s alien registration system (as blogged in this space last week). If you read Japanese, go straight to his post and read the primary sources.

Some of the details which are now clear:

Initial registration will still be done at city hall — “to the Minister of Justice by way of the mayor.” Address changes will also be made to the local government where the holder resides, but other updates will go directly to Immigration (or to whichever Justice Ministry office is designated for that purpose).
Separate re-entry permits will no longer be required for short trips out of Japan, so long as the foreigner has their zairyu card when they return. (Re-entry permits may stick around for use on longer trips out of Japan.)
Eligibility to work will now clearly show up on the face of the card as either “free to work,” “restricted to activities within status of residence” or “may not work without separate permit.”
My card will no longer say “attorney.” Dammit.

The horrors of local government

For a while I was taking comfort in the notion that if I ever lost my job, I could naturalize and become a local politician like Anthony Bianchi or Jon Heese. At least it would be a more interesting experience than the salaryman grind, right?

Well, watching this clip of city council petitioners in Santa Cruz, California has really made me question that idea.

Japan’s richest people, 2009 edition

The new Forbes list is out and this is apparently the 2009 lineup of Japanese plutocrats:

1. Tadashi Yanai (Uniqlo), $6.1 billion
2. Kunio Busujima (Sankyo), $5.2 billion
3. Hiroshi Yamauchi (Nintendo), $4.5 billion
4. Akira Mori (Mori Trust), $4.2 billion
5. Masayoshi Son (Softbank), $3.9 billion
6. Eitaro Itoyama (free agent), $3.7 billion
7. Hiroshi Mikitani (Rakuten), $3.6 billion
8. Nobutada Saji (Suntory), $3.5 billion
9. Hiroko Takei (Takefuji heiress/widow), $2.8 billion
10. Takemitsu Takizaki (Keyence), $2.4 billion

Interesting collection. No really earth-shattering moves on this list, other than the ascendancy of Uniqlo, one of the great inferior goods that’s profiting from this recession. (More on these companies here.)

Adamu had some more commentary on the “usual suspects” back in 2005: Saji, Itoyama and the late Mr. Takei were all on the list back then.

What to expect from the new national gaijin cards

Yomiuri has reported that the Justice Ministry has formally proposed to scrap the locally-administered alien registration system in favor of a national system under the control of (you guessed it) the Justice Ministry. This has been in the works since last year and would have to be approved by the Diet as an amendment to the Immigration Control and Refugee Recognition Act, so don’t expect any changes overnight, but these are the changes we can apparently expect from the new system:

Benefits for foreigners

Ordinary period of stay on work/study permits will be extended from three to five years, meaning a bit less effort and expense to stay current on registration.
The “trainee” system will be renamed to something more reflective of reality, and “trainee”-class workers will get more explicit labor law protection.
Special permanent residents (zainichi Koreans) will enjoy much easier re-entry processing. Departures from Japan for up to two years will not require a re-entry permit, and a re-entry permit will allow them to stay outside the country for up to six years (currently the maximum is four). The zainichi apparently won’t be part of the new alien registration system, but will get their own certificate instead. (They still have to carry it around, though.)
Centralizing everything at the Justice Ministry will probably cut out some of the processing time lags that exist in updating alien registration information (for instance, Japan still doesn’t know how many foreigners it finished out the year with because immigration and the city halls haven’t finished striking the records of people who left for good at year’s end). It should also spare people the shuffle of having to personally notify city hall every time their immigration status or period of stay changes.

New problems for foreigners

Assuming this replaces the existing alien registration system completely, city hall will no longer have information on the city’s foreign residents, which might affect the way municipal services get distributed (hard to tell, though).
In the same vein, since everything has to go through the Immigration Bureau, updating registered information like address or employer may not be as convenient as walking into city hall. (Here’s one blogger [in Japanese] who picked up on this drawback right away.)
According to NHK, one of the motivations behind this is that the current system does not “make it a duty” to report a change of address to city hall, which makes it harder to track the foreign population in each municipality. The subtext seems to be that there will be harsher penalties for not keeping this information up to date (right now, while foreigners are supposed to keep their address updated, nothing particularly bad happens if they forget to do so).
It seems that some personal information will be taken off the face of the card and put on an IC chip inside the card. Some paranoid folks hate the idea of the Gaijin Chip, but I am actually in favor of it if it keeps this information private to a casual observer. (The flip side is that when us foreign lawyers get carded, the cop can’t see that our profession is “attorney.”)

All this said, as David Chart points out, the Justice Ministry hasn’t been too bad to “good foreigners” lately. Although the new fingerprinting system is kind of annoying, the Ministry at least had the decency to give re-entrants a separate line at Narita immigration instead of lumping them with tourists (which was part of the initial proposal, as I recall). So it isn’t too much of a stretch to expect that they will ultimately work this system in a fairly efficient manner, even if certain points raise alarm on paper.

The proposal is now in the hands of the LDP, which will have to make it into a bill for the Diet’s consideration, so theoretically anything can happen from this point.

Never mix alcohol and cold medicine, kids

Or else you might become the Finance Minister of Japan:

The full story is here. He says it’s the latter, but we all know better.

UPDATE: News services are now reporting that Nakagawa is going to resign, citing this incident as the cause. Apparently they finally got over their implicit agreement not to mention his obvious drinking problem.

Schizophrenia in the baked goods section

I recently came back from my first trip to Taiwan, and while there are a lot of profound things which I will someday have to say about the country, the first thing I want to share with MFT is an image of a bakery which can’t decide whether it’s German or French.

The German French bakery by joejones on Zooomr

(It’s located in Danshui [淡水], just north of Taipei.)