I am stood at a bank counter in Shibuya holding a juuminhyo, Japan's residential certificate, the small beige miracle that officially confirms I exist, and a man in an immaculate suit is about to tell me that I don't. Not in those words. He's far too polite for that. He slides the paper back across the counter with both hands, bows fractionally, and informs me, with the gentle sorrow of a vet putting down a dog, that my proof-of-existence is three days over its expiry date and therefore invalid.

Three days. The document is three fucking days old and the Japanese state has decided that in that window I may have ceased to be a person. I may have moved. I may have dissolved. Who can say. The address printed on it is the address I am currently paying rent at, the address on my residence card, the address on the seventeen other forms I have filled in this morning, but none of that matters, because the magic number at the top, the issue date, has tipped over some invisible threshold and now the whole sacred artefact is bin juice.

So I cannot open the account. I have to go back to the ward office, queue, pay ¥300, and obtain a freshly minted certificate that says the exact same thing as the old one, only with a more recent date, so that I can return here and once again attempt to convince a bank that I am real. For fuck's sake.

Why the juuminhyo is the perfect bureaucratic weapon

Let me explain the genius of this thing, because it really is a masterclass, the work of some absolute clown in a back office who looked at the concept of "a citizen" and thought: how do we make this expensive and recurring?

The juuminhyo is required for almost everything. Bank account. Phone contract. Marriage. Buying a car. Half the time renting a flat. Anything where an adult does an adult thing, the counter wants a fresh residential certificate, and "fresh" means issued in the last three months, often less if the institution is feeling especially fussy, which they always are. It costs around ¥300 a copy. It expires almost immediately. And there is no way to get one delivered to your soul on a permanent basis, because that would be sensible, and sensible is not on the menu.

Do the maths over a lifetime here. You will need this fucking certificate dozens of times. Each one is a separate pilgrimage to the ward office, which is open during the precise hours you are contractually obliged to be at work, and shut at the weekend, when you are a free man. The whole system is a beautifully laminated tollbooth on the road to being treated like a human being, and you pay it again and again and again, ¥300 at a time, for the privilege of proving the thing that has not changed.

The ritual of existing, performed quarterly

And the staff are lovely. That's the bit that breaks you. There is no villain to shout at. The tossers who designed this are decades retired, and the poor soul at the counter is just a cog performing the ritual with genuine kindness, bowing, apologising, handing you a numbered ticket so you can wait forty minutes to hand over coins for a piece of A4 that the government already knows the contents of because the government printed it.

This is a country with MyNumber, a national ID system they spent a fortune building specifically so all of this could happen with one card and a database lookup. And yet here I am, a grown adult, ferrying a paper certificate across the city by hand like a medieval messenger carrying a sealed scroll, because some bloody knobhead decided the printout is the truth and the database is merely a suggestion. The future arrived, took one look at the ward office queue, and emigrated.

I got the new certificate. I went back to the bank. I opened the account. The whole performance, end to end, took two visits to two buildings and the better part of a working day, to confirm a fact that was never in dispute. The salaryman next to me at the counter had the thousand-yard stare of a man who's done this fifteen times and knows he'll do it fifteen more.

We both exist. Provisionally. Pending the next ¥300.