Hey all,
The J-Skip visa is pretty new and relatively restrictive, and I've seen a bunch of posts where people ask for feedback on the process, as they've not been able to find any, so I thought I'd share my experience quickly.
Overall, the process is extremely painless. My company went with an immigration lawyer (which I'm pretty sure you should do whenever trying to move somewhere as paperwork heavy as Japan, anyway).
In terms of documents, all I had to submit was a copy of my and my dependents' passports, a short questionnaire (to the lawyers handling it), a CV with exact dates (required by the immigration agency), a copy of my master's degree and a job offer >20M JPY with a job title relevant to the criteria of my J-Skip category, no other paperwork was requested.
The process was rather slow compared to historical processing times: It took around 45 days for me, which is considerably longer than HSP visas used to take in the past. However, I was told by the lawyers this was still quite a bit faster than the new normal: his non-J-Skip HSP clients are increasingly seeing waits of 55-60 days, so it's still "priority processing".
Getting the visa after after receiving the CoE was fairly painless, though the embassy employee was confused as this was the first time they'd processed this type of HSP visa (J-Skip is actually just a higher tier of HSP, not a separate category, and your CoE will just say "Special Highly Skilled Person")
That's pretty much it. The whole thing was very smooth, it was granted for the maximum duration of 5 years (which, I think, is the only duration available for J-Skip), though interestingly enough my dependents got 3 years (but my partner's passport is "weaker" than mine, which might explain it). I hope this is helpful for people looking for information!
by PersonalInfoThrowawy