Reporting Residency in Japan and China

In many countries you’re required to register your place of residence with some local government body. I think this is technically also the case in Norway, although I’ve rarely done it, but it’s something that I’ve now had to do both in Japan and China. In Korea, either because of my unusual visa status during my longest stay of a year, or because I simply ignore the rules regarding residence registration, I have yet to experience this process.

When I lived in Tokyo and Yokohama the registration of my place of residence was done almost immediately after my entry into Japan, because this was one of the first steps that allowed you to function in Japanese society, and do things like open a bank account, get a cell phone, and other such important initial steps to starting a life in the country. This is because the registration of one’s residency is combined with the getting of a foreigner registration card. Once, when I moved from an international dormitory near Tokyo University to a new apartment in Kichijôji, I had to go through the registration process again since the new location was technically in the city bounds of Musashino, a city in the suburbs of Tokyo.

Overall I’ve been really impressed with the smooth nature of the process in Japan, even though getting one’s registration card can take a few days and finding the local ward or city office can sometimes be a challenge if you’re fresh off the boat. Generally speaking Japanese ward and city offices, especially in larger cities, have relatively good services for foreigners and I was always impressed with the fact that when I registered myself, even though I went through application process for a foreigner registration card, I still felt like I was being welcomed into a given community. I was often offered a handful of brochures about local athletic and health facilities, trash filtering and recycling, and other information. The two times I lived in Japan a year or more I was able to get registered into the Japanese national health insurance program which allowed me to get access to relatively cheap and high quality Japanese public health services, often offered at prices much cheaper than that I might get in the US. Also, the local city and ward offices often host a number of community activities, language classes and other cultural activities, and sometimes make an extra effort to reach out to foreigners in the community through these activities and the providing of information in multiple languages. This probably wasn’t always the case but I do get the impression that Japan has come a long way in addressing the increasingly large foreign community in its cities.

Today I went through the registration process for my residency in China for the first time. Although I lived in China twice before, once for three months and once for a year, on both of these occasions I lived in a dormitory on a university campus and I don’t remember going through a similar process.

After staying in a hotel for a few days I found an apartment here by going directly to a real estate agent (believe it or not, my first stop was the nearby Century 21, which has branches in all the neighborhoods around Shandong University). Compared to my experience here in Jinan, I found this to be a much less foreign friendly process in Japan and also in Korea as in both places it’s relatively difficult to find short-term housing options that aren’t quite expensive for very modestly sized apartments. However, despite the fact that I’m in a provincial capital with most likely a small number of foreign students I was surprised to see that real estate agents almost immediately offered me a number of options when I told him I was looking for an apartment to rent for a few months. I ended up renting an apartment from a military officer who owns a number of small places in the area in clean and recently built apartment complexes, and although the real estate agent told me that registering my new residency with the local police station was more trouble than it was worth, the international office at my university told me that I did have to go through this process. It was very different from that of the Japanese process.

I was first directed to the local ward police station and then sent up to the second floor where the plain clothes police officers work in various offices there. After a short conversation with a female police officer in charge, I was then sent back to the local police corner branch located just around the corner from my apartment complex to meet someone she called on the phone there. There I was met by a friendly elderly police officer who was to join me for an “inspection.” He told me that he had to accompany me back to my apartment in order to see if my apartment was “appropriate” or not. Now, I’m sure that there were some rational reason behind this and there is some logic at work here which I’m just not aware of, but I did feel kind of strange having a police officer escort me back to my apartment, inspect it, and decide whether or not it was appropriate as my residency. He did come back with me, poked around my kitchen and bathroom, and inspected my bookshelf but didn’t go as far as opening drawers or inspecting the contents of my refrigerator. He was friendly throughout and we had a little chat before we went back to the police station. I was then sent back, again, to the main ward police station which is about 15 minutes walk down the road, where I had to fill out a registration form for outsiders taking up residency in that particular ward. I was then sent back, again, to the corner police station where I filled out another form to register me as a resident of that particular block. They also contacted my landlady to get some more information from her. Although there was a lot of going back and forth and at times it seemed like I was one of the only foreigners who had actually gone about this process, since several of the police officers seemed somewhat unfamiliar with the procedures, things went smoothly enough so that I only had to spend a single afternoon on the process. Thinking about all the visa nightmares faced, and hoops needing to be jumped through by non-imperial citizens traveling to the US, I really don’t think I have much reason to complain.