Job Discussion Forums

[fluffyhamster]

Interesting, lazjar. (I wasn't aware of that potential troublespot with City Hall, because I've not yet had to go back there for any e.g. changes of address - employer is a different matter! - since the times I've had my visa twice extended).

So, I thought I'd better check the little bilingual 'Notes' leaflet (that they give you along with your card when it is first issued), and it does indeed state that any change in the Period of Stay (item 11 on the front of the card) should have 'an application for its registration made within 14 days' of said change (the registration is to be entered on the back of the card obviously).

So, technically I was wrong, and probably mistaken in thinking that Vodafone was wanting me to get an entirely new card (I guess now that they just meant that I should get only the change itself registered), but ULTIMATELY it really is just a formality (read, 'pain in the neck'), that a person working 9-5 every weekday often simply does not have time to get around to doing (I'm pretty sure most City Halls are closed all weekend), perhaps for many months on end. I can understand the City Hall getting overbearing about this stuff, but you'd think that Vodafone would just accept photocopies of the relevant visa extensions in one's passport and attach them to the "invalid" ID card. I mean, how would the average Vodafone employee fancy taking time (i.e. leave, if they get it) off from work to get these kind of formalities done, even if it is only once or twice per year?

Anyway, I might have now lost the war here, but thankfully I won that one battle (saves me having to yo-yo back and forth between City Hall and Vodafone). I'd hope that anyone else now in the position I was will be spared the potential bureacracy and find a genuinely helpful and understanding Vodafone outlet (i.e. one prepared to accept that if a foreigner is still in Japan, chances are he or she has a new visa stamped in the passport regardless of what the ID card does or doesn't say).

[pnksweater]

fluffy hamster,

I have found my employers to be understanding when it comes to takeing a bit of time off to take care of legal/immigration issues. Of course, if they weren't we'd both be in a bit of trouble I don't know your schedule, but it really shouldn't be too hard to stop by the ward office for the ten minutes or so it takes for them to write the corrections in on the back.

It's always important to keep that gaijin card updated as you never know when you're going to get hassled.

[fluffyhamster]

When I was on JET and living in a city of only 170,000 people, it "was" (=would've been, had I been changing employers/sponsers, then moving all the time) easy to drop by the City Hall on the way home from school (and often on the way to schools with no classes in the mornings!) to get each and every little formality completed punctually - I mean, I could see it from my apartment balcony!

Now that I am living in a "bedtown" a train journey away from the local City Hall, posted at schools an hour away by train and that I have to be at from 8:30 until at least 4:30, and working for an employer who grants no paid leave whatsoever, it isn't as easy as before to find or make the time; furthermore, at least one of the schools is quite anal about things, and I can't imagine they'd be laid back about letting me slip off early or anything like that. Ah, JET was the life!

There must be many many English teachers, especially in major cities, who have quite unstable or unsatisfactory employment, and it is just a shame that this in turn leads to potentially quite a lot of red tape whenever they have to e.g. change jobs and/or accomodation; and as I say, it's one thing for City Hall to tell us to get these things done, but another for Vodafone to (in my opinion).

[wangtesol]

I remember getting a cheapo Vodafone from 7-11 in a small town in Saitama. They asked for my gaijin card which unnerved me. In Canada, Virgin has gotten into the cell phone market, so I bought a cheapo phone at 7-11 there and no ID was required at all. You fill out a form online to activate the phone where they ask for an email, but that is it. No address needed, no guarantor or any such fascist foolishness.

[fluffyhamster]

Well, I don't know if providing no address at all would be such a great idea, especially in a country where phone scams ("moshi moshi" false kidnap/blackmail/extortion capers) seem to be not only endemic but now reaching "epidemic" proportions, and where the average (Japanese) citizen just can't seem to say no to that polite man asking them to withdraw a zillion yen out and transfer it into Yakuza Ginko Jojoba account number 12345666.

That being said, it is puzzling why Vodafone needs customers who have already supplied an address (e.g. what if I was still living in Matsuyama, where I bought my Preca, and hadn't moved at all? Exactly the same circumstances, ne!) to do anything at all, especially if those Preca numbers have never been used in shady dealings and subject to complaint or investigation etc.

Vodafone are going to be suspending service after October to any user who doesn't complete the re-registration procedure, so my question ultimately is, why couldn't they simply (continue to?) suspend service to numbers that are subject to (serious, justified) complaints, and let everyone else be (especially those who have, at some point in the recent or not-so-recent past, actually submitted full details already)? Or if that wasn't enough to satisfy some politicians, why not get only those numbers for which details have never been submitted to do so?