The Saga of Renewing My Residence Card: A 47-Step Process

At some point in your Japan journey, you stop feeling like a wide-eyed tourist and start feeling like a semi-functional domestic appliance: you live here, you work here, you even have a favorite convenience store clerk.

And then Immigration reminds you:

“Calm down, toaster. You’re temporary.”

Nothing brings that reality crashing down harder than the grand boss battle of expat life: renewing your residence card. What should be a simple “Hey, I’m still alive and paying taxes” turns into a bureaucratic JRPG with more side quests than Dragon Quest XI.

So here it is:

The 47 Glorious Steps of Residence Card Renewal

1. Realize your card expires in one month. Achieve enlightenment as your soul leaves your body on the train.
2. Check the back of the card 15 times. Because if you stare at the 小さい字 long enough, maybe the date will change out of pity.
3. Google “How to renew residence card Japan” End up on four gov websites, five blogs, and a 2007 forum post from “Dave in Saitama” who never updated his thread. Possibly deported. Who knows.
4. Discover there are three different official pages with three different info sets. All contradictory. All “latest.”
5. Print the application form. Printer: 紙づまりです. Of course it fucking is.
6. Print it again. In A4. Because this is Japan, and A4 is the one true size. Letter size is foreign devil bullshit.
7. Fill out the form in black ink only. Accidentally use blue for one box. Feel an immediate, bone-deep sense of doom.
8. Try writing your address in that microscopic box. Your address is 37 characters long before you even hit the building name. You compress space-time and still run out of room.
9. Write your phone number three times. Home, mobile, emergency, blood type, favorite conbini—whatever, just give them everything.
10. Call Immigration to confirm the documents. Get a 12-minute Japanese phone menu boss fight. Finally reach a human. Get told: “It depends.” Hang up spiritually defeated.
11. Decide to bring every document you have ever owned. Residence card, passport, MyNumber card, 保険証, contract, payslips, kindergarten art from age five—fuck it, all of it goes in the folder.
12. Print out your company’s “在職証明書”. Hunt down HR. HR says, “We’ll need one week.” Your card expires in ten days.
13. Beg HR. They magically finish it in 30 minutes once you add the magic word: “在留資格”.
14. Double-check the opening hours. Realize Immigration is only open during hours when functioning adults are at work. Monday–Friday, 9:00–16:00, closed for lunch, humanity, and joy.
15. Take a day off work. Tell your boss: “I have to go to Immigration.” Boss looks at you like you’re about to the dentist of Hell. Just nods slowly.
16. Wake up at stupid o’clock. Because every guide says, “Go early or you’ll die there.”
17. Ride the train with 300 other poor bastards clutching plastic folders. You recognize each other instantly. Same dead eyes. Same aura of paperwork trauma.
18. Arrive at Immigration building. Concrete, cold, and depressing. Like a city hall had a baby with a hospital in 1973 and never renovated.
19. Join the line outside the building. It’s 8:40. They open at 9:00. There are already more people than at a Comiket limited edition booth.
20. Get handed a mysterious number ticket. You don’t know what it means, but you know it controls your fate now.
21. Pass through the automatic doors into fluorescent purgatory. The vibe is 50% tax office, 50% lost souls waiting to reincarnate.
22. Hunt for the correct counter. Visa change? Renewal? Re-entry? Alien dissection? Everything is on hand-written signs taped to pillars with arrows pointing in chaotic directions.
23. Ask the staff which counter to go to. Staff: “First, please fill out this form.” You already filled that form. This one is… slightly different.
24. Fill out The Other Form™. It’s 95% the same info, but one extra box asks why you’re still in Japan. Resist urge to write: “Stockholm syndrome.”
25. Attach a photo. Of course it has to be 4×3 cm, not 3×4. The one from the conbini is wrong by 1mm. You feel that millimeter in your soul.
26. Discover the on-site photo booth. 900 yen to immortalize your sleep-deprived, hungover face in HD. Perfect.
27. Paste the photo with a glue stick older than the building. Pray it doesn’t fall off mid-paper shuffle.
28. Take your stack of forms to the correct counter. Hand them over with the trembling reverence of a villager offering sacrifice to a mountain god.
29. Watch staff check every character you wrote. They frown. Your heart stops. “Can you write this in BLOCK letters?” You rewrite your own name like a first grader.
30. Get sent to buy a revenue stamp (収入印紙). Because nothing says “modern immigration system” like a fucking sticker tax from the Meiji period.
31. Find the stamp counter in a random corner. There’s a tiny old man in a booth made of glass and sadness. You trade yen for magic stickers.
32. Return to the main counter like you’re rejoining a raid. Attach the stamp. The staff nods like, “Yes, the ritual is proceeding.”
33. Get handed yet another number ticket. The real waiting number. The previous one was, apparently, a tutorial.
34. Sit down in the sea of plastic chairs. Your number is 482. They are currently calling 137. Welcome to eternity.
35. Binge-watch numbers on the screen. Every time it beeps, everyone’s head snaps up like Pavlov’s expats.
36. Attempt to read a book. Fail. You re-read the same sentence 26 times while a crying baby and a guy on speakerphone perform a duet of chaos.
37. Consider your life choices. “I could’ve stayed home, had a normal office job, and renewed a driver’s license once every five years. Instead I’m here arguing about hanko stamp placement in a foreign language.”
38. Finally your number is called. You power-walk to the counter like you’re on Sasuke.
39. Staff asks you the same questions from the form. “Where do you work? How long? Salary?” You resist the urge to scream: “JUST READ THE FUCKING PAPER.”
40. Get grilled about your future plans. You: “I’d like to stay in Japan long-term.” Them: 静かなうなずき + stamp noises. Your fate decided in a symphony of rubber and ink.
41. They take your residence card. You’re officially cardless. Legally naked. Foreign soul without plastic container.
42. Receive a flimsy piece of paper as your temporary proof. You must protect it like the One Ring. If you lose it, you basically don’t exist.
43. Get told: “It will take 2–4 weeks.” Which in Japanese bureaucratic time means “somewhere between next Tuesday and the heat death of the universe.”
44. Leave the building in a daze. Step outside. Realize you’ve been in there for four hours and achieved absolutely nothing except leveling up your patience stat.
45. Check your mailbox every day like a desperate Tinder match. No postcard. No update. Just supermarket flyers and NHK threats.
46. Finally receive the magic postcard. “Please come pick up your residence card.” No fireworks. No congratulations. Just another quest.
47. Return to Immigration to pick it up. New line. New wait. New stamps. But eventually, they hand over your shiny new card. You look at the expiry date. …and realize you get to do this whole shitshow again in three to five years.

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Why We Still Do It

Here’s the stupid thing: after the rage, the lines, the 収入印紙, and the ancient glue sticks, we still stay.

Because between the bureaucratic torture sessions, there’s good ramen, weird festivals, late-night karaoke, and that feeling when your local yakitori master remembers your usual order.

Japan is like that toxic ex who’s amazing 80% of the time and then suddenly makes you re-apply for the right to exist every few years.

So yeah, renewing your residence card is a 47-step emotional roller coaster through fluorescent hell…

But hey, at least when you finally get that new plastic rectangle, you walk out thinking:

“I survived Immigration. Again.

I may be temporary in their system, but I’m stubborn as fuck.”