Arrived in Japan last September as a foreign student. Somehow I managed never to hear from Nenkin in my first few months, until I went to the 区役所 for other insurance related issues and I must have been put into the system because they then sent me the payment tickets. I initially had no idea what these were, because in my home country you only contribute towards pensions once you become employed, and none of my student friends or the student affairs office had ever brought up Nenkin, but I searched through this sub to learn more about it and heard about student exemptions. I applied for an exemption for the September-April period at the end of January for with all the necessary paperwork and the 区役所 lady was very helpful and got everything done but said that my exemption “certificate” (or whatever form it takes) would take two to three months to arrive.
However, I assumed that despite this delay, they would proceed to flag me in the system as “no longer needing to be sent tickets”, and yet since the beginning of the month, I have received two letters stating that I needed to hurry up and pay my Nenkin bills, and in a fairly strongly-worded fashion too (大切なお知らせ…法律により… etc). This is quite worrying to me as I’m a student, I only applied for grants in October (I don’t even know if I’ve been selected, and even in the case I have I won’t receive anything until April) and money isn’t pouring out of my pockets, and I definitely don’t want to have to suddenly pay a backlog of 16590¥ times x months. Is this issue going to be solved once I receive my exemption certificate or is there a mistake somewhere that means I’m still being flagged by the system?
4 comments
Just wait for the exemption notice if you already applied for it. No need to worry about the payment tickets.
They specifically said “2-3 months”. It hasn’t been 2-3 months yet. Just wait, and ignore the payment slips.
I had the same thing when I got here as a student a few years back. They told me at the ward office when I applied for the exemption that I would get the nenkin bills, but also that I could just ignore them. Just like you I panicked a lot at first when i received that envelope full of bills. 2 months later I received the exemption notice and everything was fine.
Tldr this is pretty common so don’t worry about it!
Dont worry about it. Ive recieved maybe 10 notices about paying despite the deadline not being until later this year.