I have been working remotely for a Japanese company for the past 6 months and about half a month ago I got work visa and moved here with my wife.
We are working with a real estate agent who speaks both English and Japanese. For the past 15 days, we got denied a few apartment applications, and the last one made us wait for 1 week of screening then changed the guarantor company, which restarted the screening process.
The agent says the fact that we can’t talk Japanese makes finding an apartment very hard. He suggests that we should just lie and say that we do talk Japanese and forward our phone calls to someone who talks Japanese. He says there is no risk of doing this since they can’t evict us or do anything after getting the contract. We didn’t accept this suggestion since it will make us uneasy living there being afraid of someone calling all the time. But I’m not sure if this “trick” is very common and everyone in our situation is doing it… Or maybe buy a second phone number and permanently forward all calls to some friend who talks japanese..
We are learning the language and probably will be able to understand simple sentences in time but right now it’s not possible.
right now I’m staying at a monthly temp apartment at the edge of the city which costs ~200K yen a month and is very uncomfortable (smells mold, nothing is working probably) and it was very difficult to find even that because of the tourist season…
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I got denied another apartment because I don’t have my health insurance card. In order to obtain health insurance card, I need to first register a permanent address(!) to my city ward and receive “my number” card. So in order to find an apartment I first need an apartment(?).
I know it’s technically possible to register my temporary staying place as my permanent address to receive “my number” and health insurance card, but I’m advised to not mention the city office that the current address is temporary because then the city ward might not register it, since it should be at least a 3 months stay in order to count as “permanent”. It’s also possible that the temporary address is already registered to someone else that I don’t know and there is nothing which proves that I live here (such as rental contract, utility bill) because the contract is made by my employer.
by joiSoi