I took lots and lots of photographs, so I’ll do some more detailed blog entries in the near future.

Mayuki at Shirahata-san

Today was this year’s First Rabbit Festival at Shirahata-san. Because it is held on the first day of the rabbit in March, I always have to ask when it is. (I’m sure I’ve mentioned it before, but the animals of the Chinese zodiac are used for days as well as years.) Fortunately, I could attend today, and only had to rearrange one lesson. The weather wasn’t great, so at first I was going to go alone, but then I decided to ask Mayuki if she wanted to come. Her response was an enthusiastic “Yes!”, so we went to together. Yuriko stayed home, and apparently got lots done while Mayuki wasn’t here.

When we got to the shrine, we paid our respects as normal, and then Mayuki was ready to go home, as normal. I had to explain to her that there was a special ceremony today, and that we were going to stay to see it. I convinced her, but then the priest started beating the drum to mark the start of the ceremony, and Mayuki was frightened. I picked her up and held her, but she really didn’t want to go anywhere near the shrine building at that point, so I couldn’t see that part of the ceremony very well. Not that I imagine it was very different from last year, or the year before.

After the main part of the ceremony, they had the part where they shoot arrows at the targets. The two small boys who were supposed to play a major role were not desperately interested in doing so, so it was all done by the ujiko, both the ceremonial bamboo bows, and the rather more usable proper bows. By this time, it had started raining properly again, so Mayuki and I decided to go home.

I rather hope that, by taking her to ceremonies at the shrine, I’ll get her used to it, so that she can enjoy her own three-year ceremony in the autumn. We’ll see whether that works.

Our tatami-mat room. You might just be able to see the colour change where the furniture used to be.

We had to go to Yokohama to borrow a room in a bank (the bank that gave me the mortgage) where we could transfer enormous amounts of money to the relevant people, including the estate agents, insurance companies, the scrivener who was changing the deeds, and, of course, the previous owners of the flat, who got this month’s ground rent/service charge and the remainder of this year’s property tax as well as the remainder of the price of the flat itself. That was straightforward, although it did take an hour to get all the paperwork done. (So, now not only have I received a Japanese mortgage, I’ve spent it.)

On the way back, I submitted my tax return. It’s been a busy few months.

Anyway, shortly after we got home Yuriko’s friend from university came over. He’s an architect, and is in charge of the remodelling we’re going to have done.

[I've just lost more than half of the blog entry. The log-in cookie expired while I was writing, so the autosave stopped working, and when I tried to save the draft, I was sent to the log-in window and the text vanished. This is a bug in Wordpress, which I will have to report when I have time.]

On a clear day, you can see Mount Fuji from the Japanese-style room. Yesterday wasn't clear.

The new flat is in a danchi. These are large complexes of flats built in the 1970s, while Japan’s economy was booming and everyone was moving to the cities. Unlike the equivalent structures in the UK, they have not turned into sink estates. They are, however, generally very big for the price, because they are getting old, and Japanese people like new houses. Because they were built for people moving out of traditional Japanese homes, with lots of tatami matting, they all had tatami rooms. Our flat has one such room left, but it quite possibly hasn’t been redecorated since the danchi was built, so one part of the remodelling will be renovating that. We’re going to leave it Japanese-style, however, because I’ve wanted a tatami room since I got to Japan.

We’re also planning to put a partition in the living room, to create an area where Mayuki can make train layouts, or doll dioramas, or lego constructions, and leave them up for days at a time. The main other work is likely to be a counter area in the kitchen, for cooking and eating breakfast, lunch, and some dinners. More formal dinners will be eaten in the tatami room, we think.

The room nearest the entrance is going to be my office, and I’m going to teach in there. That should mean that my evening lessons won’t interrupt Yuriko and Mayuki’s normal activities, and thus should make their lives significantly easier, particularly as Mayuki gets bigger.

I’m looking forward to seeing what the place looks like after remodelling. I think it will look much more interesting than it does now.

Apparently, while I am a representative, I will be a special local civil servant. I think the “special” part means that I don’t get any of the normal benefits of being a civil servant. You know, pension, secure job, that sort of thing. I do get some money for turning up to meetings, but let’s just say I wouldn’t do this job for the money alone.

The city is holding a meeting to introduce the assembly and the city before the formal first meeting, so I should learn quite a lot about Kawasaki at that point. I also need to work on what I want to discuss at the assembly. I have, as I mentioned, some ideas, but I have held off working on any details until I got the notification. After all, with twice as many applicants as places, there was no guarantee I would get on.

Now I suppose I should point out that when I post on this blog, I am posting in an entirely personal capacity, and my opinions do not necessarily reflect the opinions of the assembly. Sometimes, I might not even believe that they should.

The main change is that instead of the current Alien Registration Cards, or Gaijin Cards, there will be new IC-chip cards, issued directly by the Ministry of Justice. The card will carry basically the same information as the current ARC, although some information has been cut. It looks, for example, as if your region of birth and place of residence in your country of citizenship have gone. In the latter case, that’s very sensible, as long-term resident foreigners don’t have a place of residence in their country of citizenship. It will still have a photograph on it, but apparently the plan is to issue it when you enter the country, so maybe they plan to take your photo for you as soon as you step off the plane. Some or all of the information on the card will be recorded on the IC chip, but maybe not all of it. The web pages are clearly unclear on this; they explicitly say “all or some” of the information.

This has also changed the way you notify changes in details. Main details, like your name and citizenship, have to be notified to the immigration office. Interestingly, the page explicitly lists changes of sex as something you have to report to the immigration office. I have no idea whether the Japanese government recognises transexual Japanese citizens, but apparently they do recognise transexual foreigners. Of course, they also say that you should notify changes in your date of birth to the immigration office. I am truly at a loss to work out how that could happen; discovering an error in the initial registration? (Actually, I suppose that if you were a refugee, you might not, initially, know, and later find out.) Your address still has to be notified to the local municipal office, just as now, but apparently you won’t have to do it in person any more.

They’ve also added a few new situations that can get you chucked out of the country. Lying on your applications, lying about or failing to report your change of address within 90 days, not actually living with your “spouse” for over six months, and so on. It looks like these are basically there to close loopholes in the current law that made it difficult to deport people who had clearly broken the rules. On the other hand, there are quite a few exceptions for “good reasons”, such as fear that your abusive spouse will continue to beat you up, or your employer suddenly went bankrupt, throwing you out on the street. They’ve also added rules allowing them to deport people for helping other people enter the country illegally, which makes sense.

They also say that they are looking into making it possible to report changes to the immigration office by post or over the internet. This is important for people living on, say, Hachijojima, who would be quite a long way from the local immigration office. At the moment, you have to go in person, but the plan is to remove that requirement.

However, you are required to carry your Residence Card at all times, and your passport is not a substitute. That means that, if they do set it up to allow changes by post, they won’t be able to require you to submit your current card with your change notification, and will have to send you a new one first. No doubt this is one of the problems they are working on.

It is worth noting that this addresses the biggest practical problem that occurred to me when I heard about the system; some people live a long way from the nearest immigration office (I don’t), and if they had had to register all changes there it would have been a serious hassle. If you can do address changes locally and the others by post, that basically solves that problem. When I blogged about this in Japanese, I observed that I expected them to solve the issue, because they normally do.

There are also some concrete benefits for resident foreigners. First, the longer visas are all likely to be extended from three years to five years, and the student visa length has been extended to the length of a university course. I imagine the latter is going to be very helpful to students. (They say they are still investigating exactly which visas will be extended, but that basically all the three year ones will be.) Your residence card will have the same duration as your visa, unlike the current ARC, which has a completely independent five year duration, and you will get your new residence card when they put the new visa in your passport. This, incidentally, removes the need to go and tell the municipal office when you get your visa extended. Permanent residents will have seven-year cards. At the moment, it looks as though you will have to apply for a new one, but I wouldn’t be surprised if they change that to sending them out automatically. After all, they know they have your latest address, and if they don’t, so you don’t get the card, they can deport you anyway, and it’s less hassle for them to do it automatically. They can just program the computer to spit it out. It will need a way to apply if you don’t get one, but you’d need that anyway.

The visa length extension bit made the news. The other benefit doesn’t seem to have, and I haven’t noticed the expat community being aware of it.

The re-entry permit system is basically being abolished. If you have a valid passport and residence card, you will not need a re-entry permit if you leave Japan for less than a year (less than two years for special permanent residents). If you want to go for longer, you will need to get a re-entry permit, just like now, but it will be good for five years, rather than three (six, for special permanent residents). There may also be special situations in which you still need a permit; those haven’t been decided yet.

Note: this system is not yet in force. You still need a re-entry permit at the moment.

Some people have privacy worries about the IC chip (there are concerns over just how remotely it can be read; maybe you should carry the card wrapped in tin foil), but if the MoJ does its job properly and makes sure that it can only be read by people who are entitled to do so, I don’t see that it adds much to the current rules. Apart from that, it looks like these changes will all make life easier for people who are in Japan legally.

It was extremely interesting. Shrine Shinto as a whole has no unified approach to internationalisation, it would seem, which is hardly surprising, as individual shrines are very independent. However, the speakers told us about their experiences, activities, and research, which shed quite a lot of light on the question.

The first two speakers were the chief priests of shrines in Hawaii. These shrines were founded by Japanese immigrants in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and both of the priests had been sent out from Japan to lead the shrines. One has since taken US citizenship, which requires him to renounce his Japanese citizenship according to the laws of both countries, so he is now a non-Japanese Shinto priest; an example of internationalisation all by himself.

The first one to speak was Revd Takizawa, the chief priest of Hawaii Kotohira Jinsha – Hawaii Dazaifu Tenmangu. (I know it’s normally “jinja”, but the shrine spells it “jinsha” on their home page, and it’s their name.) He was born in Nagoya, but apparently worked in Hawaii for a while before training as a priest. He was sent back to Hawaii, to lead the shrine, in 1994.

At that time, very few of the third-generation Japanese Americans were attending the shrine, and the surrounding area was not good, with a lot of crime and drug problems. The shrine was holding three events per year, at New Year and the two main festivals, and about a thousand people attended on New Year’s.

He started work right away on raising the shrine’s profile. He got involved in local community activities, trying to address the local problems, so that people knew there was a shrine there. He also increased the number of events that the shrine held, so that people would be less likely to forget about it. A guiding idea behind this was the desire to introduce Japanese culture to people in Hawaii. Thus, they started serving o-zoni, traditional Japanese New Year food, at the New Year festival. They also got some children’s kimonos, and provided free kimono rental to children attending the seven-five-three festival in November. We saw some photographs of that, and some of the children were clearly not of Japanese descent. If I’m reading my notes correctly, about 400 people did 7-5-3 last year.

In August, to go with the start of the American academic year, the shrine holds a Back to School ceremony, which is appropriate for a Tenmangu, as those are shrines dedicated to Sugawara no Michizane, a kami of scholarship. In June, they hold the summer grand purification, but with a twist: they do purification for pets, as well. That seems to be very popular, judging from the photographs of the people attending.

As a result of this, he said that they now get about 10,000 people on New Year’s, although he also said that the core group of volunteers helping to run the shrine is only ten people. Mind you, that proportion sounds about right to me. He also has a second priest, also sent from Japan, working at the shrine, and training to take over when the Rev Takizawa retires. From the sounds of things, that shrine is thriving.

The second speaker was the chief priest of Hilo Daijingu, Rev Watanabe. He has naturalised as a US citizen, so he is now a non-Japanese Shinto priest. However, he was born in Niigata Prefecture and trained in Japan, and apparently spoke no English when he went over to Hawaii. Apparently, when he applied for his visa, the US immigration department pointed out that the shrine where he was working then and Hilo Daijingu enshrined different kami, and wondered whether he was really the same religion as the shrine he was supposed to work at. He got round that by having two lawyers, one an expert in immigration law and the other an expert on religious law (and one of them the son of the former chief priest of one of the Hawaiian shrines), who convinced immigration that Shinto isn’t divided by kami.

Although the shrine is called Hilo Great Shrine (Daijingu), it’s actually quite a small shrine, the same sort of scale as a neighbourhood shrine in Japan, and that’s the atmosphere that Revd Watanabe says that he aims for. It is, however, the only shrine on Hawaii’s Big Island, which is apparently about half the size of Shikoku, but with a much lower population. He said that, although people are very spread out, there’s a strong community in the sense that everyone knows everyone else, particularly within the Japanese-American community.

Hilo Daijingu gets about 4000 people at New Year’s, and holds Tsukinamisai twice a month, on the first and fifteenth. About 40 families attend on the first, about 10 on the fifteenth. Most of the attendees are older people, but the number hasn’t changed over the ten years he’s been there. Although some people have died, others have retired and started attending. About 90 families come to the Great Purifications, and he does about 20 to 30 petitions per month.

They have a garage sale in the shrine every year, which serves two purposes. First, it’s something for the organising committee to do, meaning that the meetings have more substance, and they get to know each other better. Second, it gives people who do not think of themselves as Shinto a reason to visit the shrine, and the feeling that they can enter the grounds. He also holds ceremonies on the US public holidays that aren’t specifically Christian, like Independence Day.

Revd Watanabe says that he tries to talk to anyone who comes into the shrine grounds, to make them feel welcome. Japanese tourists sometimes come, and it’s apparently often the first time they’ve spoken to a Shinto priest. He says that he wants to make people feel that they want to go back to a shrine, whether Hilo Daijingu or one nearer home back in Japan.

This shrine also seems to be doing quite well. However, it was noticeable from the photographs that most of the people seriously involved with the shrines looked to be of Japanese descent. Revd Watanabe explicitly mentioned that Japanese Americans form most of the attendees at ceremonies. These shrines seem to be good examples of religions that have travelled with immigrants, and while both sound like they are very healthy at the moment, I do wonder whether their appeal will spread beyond the Japanese American community, or even whether they want it to.

This has got quite long, so I’ll break here, and post about the other speakers later.

Well, I got it from a big Japanese bank (Bank of Tokyo-Mitsubishi UFJ (MUFG), one of the three megabanks), I’m foreign, and I don’t have permanent residence. According to received wisdom in the expat community here, that should have made it impossible. And yet I signed (strictly, stamped my hanko on) all the contracts today. The money will be there when I buy the flat, I have 35 years to pay it back, and the interest rate is barely over 1%; I got a discounted rate because I only borrowed 80% of the value of the property.

That seems to be the only thing that really mattered; it was the condition that the estate agents passed on when talking about the application.

I am married to a Japanese citizen, and she has signed the guarantor papers. However, as far as I can tell, that was only because we are going to jointly own the flat, and thus I can’t secure a mortgage on it without her agreement. They certainly didn’t require any evidence of her income, which is probably just as well; in the most recent year we can provide evidence for, she earned nothing, because she hadn’t gone back to work. And even now, three days a week part-time wouldn’t pay the mortgage. Indeed, we had to fill the application forms in again, because the initial forms were sent out on the assumption that I would be the sole owner of the flat, so only I signed them. The mortgage contract itself is purely in my name.

I’m also not employed on a massive salary by a major company. In fact, I’m self-employed, and earn less than the average Japanese salary. (Not vastly less, mind you, but less.) I do have three years of stable income from self-employment to show, which I imagine was important. Certainly, they asked for evidence of that, and were quite particular about the form of the evidence.

I’m not aware of any personal connection to important executives at MUFG. Of course, my students sometimes turn out to have surprising connections, but I hadn’t mentioned this to any of them, so I think we can rule that out.

On the other hand, the estate agents said that MUFG was the only bank that would give me a mortgage without permanent residence, and as far as I can tell from their flyers they normally work with the Bank of Yokohama, so presumably there was a problem with them. So, speculating, MUFG may have changed their policy so that they offer mortgages to foreign residents who look likely to stay put, regardless of their current visa status (as long as they have one; I had to produce my Alien Registration Card). It could be limited to people married to a Japanese citizen, but my wife’s involvement appears to have depended entirely on that fact that she will be a joint owner of the flat, so maybe not.

The application process was fairly smooth and painless. As I mentioned, it took a couple of attempts to get the application forms right, and I sent some documents they didn’t want, so I had to send the right ones afterwards. The only personal contact was a phone call from the security company backing the mortgage. It went as follows.

“This is the MUFG mortgage guarantee company. Am I talking to David Chart?”

“Yes.”

“Did you apply for a mortgage of umptymumble yen over 35 years?”

“Yes.”

“Please tell me your address.”

“Here you go: [address]”

“And your date of birth.”

“[Date of birth].”

“Thank you very much. We will take the application forward.”

(My address and date of birth were both, of course, on the application forms; those questions were presumably to confirm that they really were talking to me.)

Obviously, the whole conversation was in Japanese, and the estate agents said that the bank wouldn’t lend money to a foreigner who couldn’t speak Japanese, so maybe that was the most important language exam I’ve ever taken. Fortunately, it was really, really easy. (Thinking about it, no-one at the bank today asked whether I could understand Japanese or read kanji; they just took it for granted. Maybe it’s a formal condition. If so, I don’t know why, nor what their standard for “can speak Japanese” is.)

In any case, the concrete fact is that MUFG has given a standard-terms 35 year 80% mortgage to a self-employed foreigner without permanent residence. If you’re a foreigner trying to get a mortgage in Japan, I suggest giving MUFG a try.