2 years and counting...

Yesterday (February 10th) was the 2 year anniversary of D and I doing the "paperwork" and legally tying the knot. (Our actual wedding ceremony took place on March 6th) I was going through some files and found the article I wrote about my experiences. It was published in a local English newsletter: My experiences of getting married in Kagoshima. Getting married in Japan to a Japanese national is (in some ways) a lot easier than you would think it is. In other ways, it is a real struggle and you are constantly dealing with bureaucracy, which is never very much fun! In Japan, it is not legally necessary to have a ceremony of any description. All you have to do is submit a 婚姻届 (konintodoke) to city hall (or the local government office where you live). You don`t even both have to be present at the time, as long as the forms are signed/stamped in the right places. This wonderful process is known as 入籍(nyuuseki) or 籍を入れる(seki wo ireru). In order to “do nyuuseki” (as I will call it from now on) you both need various documents. Not surprisingly, the documents I needed were more in number and cost far more to get!! If you are still in Japan, you need to go to your local consulate (if you are British, this involves a trip to Osaka) in person to register your intent to get married. This then gets “posted” in the consulate for 21 days and at the end of the 21 days the consulate will issue you with a “Certificate of No Impediment” in Japanese which proves you aren`t married. This part of the process is standard in the UK, it isn`t just something made up to get more money out of people living in Japan like I originally thought!!! I was lucky enough to be in the UK when I decided to get my CNI and as a result only had to make a trip to the local marriage registrar rather than going all the way up to Osaka. I did have to send the document to Osaka for a translation though so the process ended up costing twice as much as it would to get married in the UK, but less that it would have cost to go to Osaka. I have nothing but praise for the British Consulate in Osaka though. I originally e-mailed them for help, not expecting to get a reply but I got a reply the next day answering all my questions. Every time I e-mailed with another enquiry, it was answered the next/ same day. I originally thought the whole process was horrifically inconvenient but they made it all a little bit easier. When I had received my CNI and Alien Registration Card (it is possible to register for one of these even if you are just here on a 3 month tourist visa and you need it to get married), I went to city hall to confirm exactly what I would need to bring with me when we went to “do nyuuseki”. By pure coincidence, I chose lunchtime to go which meant there were only a few people left in the department but one guy (I think he was a kakaricho) sat down and wrote down exactly what I would need. Necessary documents are: Your fiancé`s 戸籍謄本(family register, more about this document later), some proof of his ID, (we took his passport but a driving licence is good enough), the CNI (translated into Japanese), your passport and your Alien Registration card. You also need to fill out the 婚姻届(konintodoke) and have it witnessed by two people over the age of 20. These people can be anyone, they don`t even have to be Japanese. (I would also take along a translation of the information page of your passport, this can be done by hand but apparently they need it to prove your nationality.) When you submit this form, it is checked for mistakes etc.. and then you are given a number and asked to wait. A little while later, they hand you a piece of paper which certifies the submission of your marriage application and BOOM! You are officially married. I was kind of distressed by the coldness of all this. No-one at city hall said “Congratulations” or anything. How depressing! Once we had this document, we then had to register the marriage on my gaijin card (I went from co-habitant to wife in one swish of the pen) As you can see, the whole process was pretty easy, it is just the filling out of forms and collecting the necessary documents that takes time. *Things to be aware of when getting married to a Japanese person* 1) When two Japanese people marry, the wife is registered as a wife on the husband`s new 戸籍謄本(family register) When a Japanese person marries a foreigner, the marriage is noted in the “notes section” in a “by the way, on such and such a date, this Japanese person got married to a foreigner named Y from X nation” kind of way. 2) According to Japanese law, foreigners cannot be officially registered on the 住民票(jyu-minhyou- residency record) of their spouse. In most parts of the country however, the fact that the Japanese person is living with their foreign spouse is registered in the “other notes” section of the 住民票 so at least it doesn`t look as if the person lives alone. Kagoshima has yet to catch up with other parts of the country and as a result, Japanese people in Kagoshima who live with their foreign spouse are registered as living alone. It is only registered on Alien Registration Certificate of the foreign spouse. This means that every time you want to prove that you live together, you have to apply for both the 住民票　and the Alien Registration Certificate. Despite this anomaly, wards in Tokyo have awarded 住民票(residency records) to both Tama-chan (a seal who became famous after living in the river of a ward in Yokohama) and ATOM BOY the manga/ anime character. I find it quite horrifying that a seal and a fictitious mange character can have their own 住民票(jyuuminhyou) and I can`t even be added in the notes of my husband`s document. I have to admit that the realisation of the above two facts depressed me more than I ever believed it would. It just seems terribly unfair and offensive that our marriage is only legally registered in the “notes section” of his family document and that officially, he lives alone. I hoping that in the future, this will start to change but until more people realise that this is what happens (most Japanese people assume that when you marry a Japanese person, you instantly become Japanese, if only they knew how different the reality is) my children are not going to have a mother properly registered on their family documentation and that is what upsets me the most.