Job Discussion Forums

[Wisco Kid]

After taking 14 weeks to make my wife's Certificate of Eligibility for her dependent's visa, the Saitama branch of the Immigration Department is now telling me that it is impossible to get my original Marriage Certificate back. I asked where the certificate was, and the lady could only say that after they "entered it into the computer" it was "impossible to get back" . I asked if they put it in the garbage, and she she said "not in the garbage, but it was in the computer, so you can't get it back now".

What is she talking about ?!!!!

Is this a new type of computer that actually eats physical documents, or was it just a really, really lame attempt to save face by denying that they threw it out?

It's not going to be a big problem for me since we actually got two identical marriage certificates when we registered our marriage in Thailand last year. But I can see how this would create big problems for other people in similar circumstances.

Does it have anything to do with the fact that my wife is Thai? I'm sure that the Immigration folks naturally assume every Southeast Asian woman is a prostitute, and that's why the application took so long in the first place, but does that give them the right to just dispose of my original documents once they have finished using them?

[Brooks]

I know a guy who works at the Thai embassy and I have heard a lot about Thai people working in Japan without work visas.
Some of them are promised jobs as dancers, singers, etc. but they end up as prostitutes.

The Japanese government wants to reduce the number of people staying without proper documents, so these things can take longer.

People coming back from Bangkok can get a hard time at customs, too, whether they are foreign or Japanese.

There are fake marriages in Japan so immigration wants to check these things out. I applied for a spouse visa and it took time but it is far easier than it is for my wife to get a green card.

[Glenski]

Wisco Kid,
Write a (professionally) nasty letter to some higher immigration authority and/or to the Ministry of Justice. Easy enough to retrieve or not, I'd still go one level higher.