I’ll be entering on a spouse visa. My father-in-law is filling for my COE. He says he was told by ISA that the COE should be valid on the date of entry. My understanding was that it only needed to be valid up through the application for a visa.
See Q6 here. https://www.isa.go.jp/en/applications/guide/kanri_qa.html
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Q6. Is there a validity period for Certificates of Eligibility?
The validity period is three months. Therefore, you have to file your landing application within three months from the day your Certificate of Eligibility is issued or else the certificate will become invalid.
(Note) Please note that the validity period of the Certificate of Eligibility is different from the validity period of the visa.
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On this page ( https://www.mofa.go.jp/j_info/visit/visa/long/visa10.html ), though, it says:
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Furthermore, by presenting the certificate at the time of the examination for landing, the examination procedures will be smoothly carried out.
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But that doesn’t seem to imply it must be an unexpired COE.
What I’m trying to do is get a COE as early as possible to allow extra time for mishaps (lost in the mail, etc). But the guy at the ISA office is saying not to submit now but to wait until much closer to my travel date. Since I can apply for the visa 3 months prior to entry, my assumption has been that I can get the COE (valid for 3 months) issued up to nearly 6 months early, as long as there is sufficient overlap in the two windows.
So the question is: what do? You would think the ISA guy should know what’s what, but that timetable makes me nervous.
1 comment
>But that doesn’t seem to imply it must be an unexpired COE.
Your first link to the ISA FAQ ***very clearly*** states (not just “implies”, *states*) that your COE must be valid.
The “Landing Application” is when you arrive in Japan.
>You would think the ISA guy should know what’s what, but that timetable makes me nervous.
Well, the ISA guy *is* the expert, after all.
You claim to be concerned about things going wrong with your COE (“to allow extra time for mishaps”) but you’re completely ignoring the things that are *actually* likely to go wrong (Flight delays, delays getting an embassy appointment, weather, etc).
You are ***FAR*** more likely to encounter travel delays then you are to encounter delays with your CoE delivery. And since you’re entering on a spouse visa you don’t have a fixed “Must enter Japan on this date” schedule anyways, so why take risks by trying to min-max your CoE/visa time? File the application a few months before you want to leave. When the CoE arrives, get a visa and then buy a ticket. Why make it more complicated than it needs to be?