How Did You Come to Japan?

By plane. Of course. Ok, I’m sorry, that was a bad joke. The title too is a joke but you’ll get the explanation only if you read on until the end of this post. And yes I am totally trying to trick you into reading this until the end.

Seriously though, if you’ve followed my column long enough you might know that I’m currently living in Japan and am going to start a new corner about my life in there. The logical start of this column is to tell you about how I came to live (temporarily) in Japan.

You should know by now that if you want to live in Japan you’re in for quite a fight. If only because of the mass of papers and justifications that are required. I made use of a wonderful thing that allows French citizens (and a few other) to go and work and do pretty much anything you want in Japan for a year (of course, as long as you abide by the law. Trust me, they don’t joke when they come to rules.) That thing is called the Working Holiday Visa and I strongly urge you (if you’re not over 30 years old) to check it out because you can do that in a lot of countries and it’s pretty interesting.

It’s really nice because you don’t need a job first as you would do with a normal work visa, you don’t need the infamous diploma either.

It’s also really nice because you don’t need to have as much money as you would need for a student visa. Not only that but to get the student visa you need to have someone sponsoring you. And school in Japan isn’t exactly cheap either.

While I didn’t experience the process for a work visa I am currently in the middle of the process of asking for a student visa so I can stay past the expiration date of my working holiday visa and nothing could convince them of letting me apply without a sponsor. Also, it took one month to just fill the application paper and so I strongly advise to start early if you’re going that route.

Back on my working holiday visa. Once I had filled and wrote the papers (that took 2 hours), made the trip to the consulate (that was 3 hours), got the visa on my passport (three days + 3 hours of trip to the consulate), I could virtually leave for Japan any day I choose. And so I did 2 months later.

I have been there since March and really hope I will get that student visa so I can stay beyond that. Updates on that next february (hopefully ^^).

Until then, stay tuned !

PS: The title comes from a Japanese TV program that translates as “Why did you come to Japan?” in which a TV crew interview foreigners about their reasons for coming to Japan. It’s a bit less strange as some other things you can find on TV. Unless the people interviewed are strange themselves indeed … (To be fair though, I met 2 of them completely by chance and they’re perfectly normal IRL. More or less.)