Immigration

Intro

I have now lived in Japan as a resident for more than half a year. I’ve been through the process of finding a place to live and moving into it. And just today I paid my taxes for last year. So it feels okay to say that I’ve officially “immigrated.” Prior to this experience I was not someone who spent a lot of of time thinking about the logistics required to simply exist somewhere, so I learned a lot.

Visas

I had always taken it for granted that the USA was okay with me existing in the country simply by being physically born within its borders. However when it comes to living in a different country, you will need to justify your presence there with something called a visa. Japan has different kinds of visas with their own pros and cons. For an engineer like myself, I basically had two choices: the Highly-Skilled Professional (HSP) visa or the Engineering and Humanities visa.

To me, the main benefit of the HSP is that it lasts at least 5 years. This will allow me to quickly apply for permanent residence in the future, which requires a visa that last more than 1 year. The problem with this visa is that it is tied to a specific employer, so a visa status change is necessary with any employment change. I went with the HSP visa since I wanted to keep the option of permanent residency as available as possible, and was okay with the potential risk of employment change.

The Engineering and Humanities visa can last between 3 months and 5 years. So if you happen to get the 1-year (or less) visa, you will not be able to quickly apply for permanent residence. The benefit of this visa is that it’s not tied to a specific employer and you can be legally unemployed with this visa if you wish.

Moving in

I needed a physical address to do any of the following things: register an address on my residence card, get a cellphone, apply for social health insurance, get a bank account, etc. The catch-22 is that typically to apply to move in somewhere, you need a bank account and phone number first. The trick to bypassing this circular dependency is by first obtaining a physical address with less stringent requirements as a “jumping off” point, and then from there possibly moving to another place with a tougher application process.

Once I had a visa and an address I was able to get a cellphone. Rakuten allowed me to sign a contract with them and pay for it with my foreign credit card. It took 3-4 hours to sign the contract.

The only bank that I could find which would accept freshly immigrated Americans like myself was JP Bank. They seem accustomed to foreigners and I was able to get through the initial appointment very quickly. About a week or two later I received a “cash card” and very soon after that I was able to apply for a credit card.

Cost of moving is not completely reflected by the monthly rent. In my case, there were costs in the form of: security deposit (1x rent), “gratuity” (1x rent), realtor agent fee (1x rent), two months of rent ahead of time, and mandatory rent insurance (0.5x rent) which protects you from your own potential failure to pay rent in time. This adds up to almost 6 months worth of rent in upfront costs, which includes 2.5 months worth of rent in additional costs on top of actual rent, ignoring the security deposit which will come back. Potential future optimization includes finding a place that does not require “gratuity.”

Taxes

If you live in your home country and just collect a salary like I did for a long time, then you might not have to think too much about taxes as they are more or less automatically paid through income withholding. In Japan this is also the case, and in fact, there is even less to do because your company will do almost all the work for you. However, for me the situation became complicated during the immigration process.

USA and Japan have tax treaty which ensures that you don’t owe Japan anything on any income you generate while physically in Japan until you’ve lived there for 183 days. So if you decide to be in Japan while remotely working for a foreign company… don’t be like me and don’t stay more than 183 days. However, even if you do you can still recover that money through foreign tax credits on the American tax return. Interestingly, this results in an effective transfer of wealth from USA to Japan, which makes sense because you were physically present in Japan for more of the year than in the USA.

Remittance tax is applied to any transfer of foreign income to Japan, possibly including credit card payments. So it’s a good idea to stop using a foreign credit card after obtaining a Japanese visa. The possibly intended effect of this is that new Japanese residents are highly incentivized to contribute to the Japanese economy.

I racked up a lot of taxes during my first year immigrating here, which was fine with me but actually paying the taxes was similar to a bad trip. JP Bank, while being very generous in accepting newly-immigrated residents, still applies tight restrictions on account usage. In the end, I was able to use some official documentation to convince them to let me withdraw large wads of cash which I promptly handed to the Japanese government.

Conclusion

I hope my experience benefits you. I’m just glad to be on the other side of a lot of process and slowly feeling like I actually live here. The truly silver lining is that even though I stumbled through everything as a foreigner who talks funny, all the people who helped me have treated me with perfect respect like just any other human being, and it’s not every place or every day you can say that.