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Go on a tourist visa, get a work visa in Japan?
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HLJHLJ

Joined: 06 Oct 2009
Posts: 1218
Location: Ecuador

Posted: Tue Oct 23, 2012 7:26 am Post subject:

You are unlikely to find many first hand accounts of people who've been deported or jailed for visa violations on a board that is primarily dominated by people who are currently teaching in Japan.

Glenski

Joined: 15 Jan 2003
Posts: 12844
Location: Hokkaido, JAPAN

Posted: Tue Oct 23, 2012 10:40 am Post subject:

hagiwaramai wrote:

It's funny, people usually say how strict Immigration is, but the only experiences I've heard of concerning them have been positive.

You really have not had enough experience, then.

Quote:

One where somebody was allowed in to work with no fuss on a new passport but with only photocopies of the visa from their old passport due to passport problems, one where somebody managed to persuade them to give them some kind of re-entry permit at Narita Immigration because there wasn't an immigration office at the airport as they thought there was,

Those are not instances of lax immigration.

Quote:

and finally my friend who overstayed his spouse visa but was just subjected to a lecture about being a "naughty boy" and allowed to stay. Has anyone actually had or heard of any bad experiences?

Yes, more than once I have heard firsthand from people who did the same thing. It was scary to say the least, being "detained" in a separate room from others, grilled for hours about why they overstayed, until finally the spouse had to come in and spend more time vouching for them. It wasn't "just" a lecture. They risked losing their visa, and they had to sign an official apology.

Last edited by Glenski on Thu Oct 25, 2012 10:04 pm; edited 1 time in total

Pitarou

Joined: 16 Nov 2009
Posts: 1116
Location: Narita, Japan

Posted: Tue Oct 23, 2012 11:23 am Post subject:

hagiwaramai wrote:

Pitarou wrote:

hagiwaramai wrote:

Pitarou wrote:

hagiwaramai wrote:

Has anyone actually had or heard of any bad experiences? I.e. like this, being turned away because they said they were going to work after coming as tourist?

It's well documented.

It's not well documented at all. ... do you have any first hand or trusted sources that have any experiences?

Let me google that for you.

One Japan Times article from 2005 ... a piece from a secretive journalist ... and one piece on a forum by an ex-Nova teacher does not add up to well-documented.

Are we looking at the same Google? I'm sure there were more than three hits. And you don't even mention the very first one. I quote:

Quote:

When Bay Area students Angela Luna and Richard Nishizawa tried to board a plane bound for San Francisco in March, airport authorities threw them in a small holding cell and held them incommunicado for several days before banishing them from Japan for five years. ... They had merely stayed in the country two weeks longer than their [five year] visas permitted.

There are plenty more accounts like that, if you look properly.

You're right that the system has some flexibility, especially if:

1. You're already established in Japan.
2. You look respectable.
3. You put on a convincing display of remorse.
4. You get good legal advice, and voluntarily confess your sins.

But there are no guarantees. Nobody even pretends that the system is fair.

As for the secretive journalist, I agree he is a thoroughly unreliable source. I'm certainly not relying on his account alone! But his story did raise a lot of intense discussion on a few forums. What I shared with you earlier is what I learnt from that discussion.

For what it's worth, I'll give you my take on what happened to the journalist. (His name did come out in the end, but I can't remember who he is now.) I think the forum pretty much got to the bottom of the story.

Basically, he was hopping in and out of Japan on a succession of tourist visas. One day, immigration noticed what was going on and denied him entry. At that point, he became the responsibility of the airline. Immigration's attitude is, "He has no rights. Do what you want with him. Just get him out of the country." Now, airlines aren't set up to handle this kind of mess, but they don't like non-paying passengers. So they handed him over to to the "specialists" (a branch of G4S, if memory serves).

hagiwaramai

Joined: 24 May 2010
Posts: 119
Location: Marines Stadium

Posted: Thu Oct 25, 2012 1:07 pm Post subject:

HLJHLJ wrote:

You are unlikely to find many first hand accounts of people who've been deported or jailed for visa violations on a board that is primarily dominated by people who are currently teaching in Japan.

Sorry for the late reply, but I never asked only for stories of people who have been deported or jailed. If you only read Pitarou's reply perhaps you would think that, but if you read the cases I cited in the first place, only one of them was about a visa violation.

hagiwaramai

Joined: 24 May 2010
Posts: 119
Location: Marines Stadium

Posted: Thu Oct 25, 2012 1:34 pm Post subject:

Pitarou wrote:

Are we looking at the same Google? I'm sure there were more than three hits. And you don't even mention the very first one.

Again sorry for the late reply. I honestly don't know if we are looking at the same Google, I couldn't find that story. The first one that came up for me was an official website and the second one was the Japan Times article

Pitarou wrote:

You're right, the system does have some flexibility

That's what I was getting at really. As I said above I wasn't talking solely about visa violations. That was only one of the cases I cited and I didn't intend that to be focused on. I was just surprised at there being even one case of someone being allowed to stay in the country, let alone the others that have been mentioned since, plus the other 3 or 4 people who were there with my friend the same day he had to apologise. After all you hear you'd think there'd be no chance of being allowed to stay after overstaying. I didn't want to focus on visa violations because they're cut and dried, or so I thought, but more on experiences where things could go one way or the other, like as I said trying to wrangle a re-entry permit at the airport, or trying to get a visa extension while working various part-time jobs. Not things that are blatantly illegal or visa violations but things that are a little less set in stone. It's cases like that that I've heard mainly good reports from people. People being allowed to stay when they've even violated a visa status is just a bonus on top of that! I also find it funny how much more flexible or open to persuasion officials can be in Japan compared to England, when you might expect it to be the other way round.

Edited to ask, G4S isn't Group 4 is it? In Japan?

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