Hi Everyone,
My wife and I are moving to Japan for 6-months on the working holiday visa and plan on moving around a lot.
While preparing for our trip, I noticed that one of the Japan Residence Card requirements is that you provide a “Notification of change of address” within 14-day of moving to another fixed address in Japan. They stipulate this is for “fixed adresses, or a service appartment where you are allowed to register the address.”. This has me a little confused, and worried that I’ll be running down to the local municipal office every second-day…
Within our six month trip we’ll be living in Tokyo, Fukuoka, Sapporo, and a few other places between. For most of our trip our accomodation is either Airbnb or hotels. The only serviced apartment booking on our trip will be appromiately 3-weeks after we arrive.
Do we need to change our place of residence every time we move during the trip? Or is it only in locations where you’re engaged in a landlord tenancy?
As we won’t be moving into the serviced apartments for 3 weeks after arrival, what should we be putting as our place of residence when we first arrive?
All a bit confusing to me. Thanks for your help.
2 comments
This has been discussed here quite a few times in the past.
The short answer is that yes, you are expected to keep your address up to date, including doing the moving-out and moving-in procedures at the respective city halls when you change cities.
Yes, it’s a giant pain in the ass for folks doing a working holiday, but there aren’t any exceptions written into the law, so… ¯\\\_(ツ)_/¯
There is a sort-of exception to the requirements for the *initial* address registration, which is where the fixed address/serviced apartment thing you’re referring to comes from. But that exception is so that people don’t have to register their hotels while they’re looking for permanent housing. It is ***not*** something that should be relied upon to avoid registration for the entire duration of a working holiday.
Also… You might end up double-screwed with your plan, because not every hotel/airbnb can serve as a registered address. Different cities have different regulations on that, and even if the city allows it, you still need to be able to receive mail there, which may not be something the hotel/airbnb will allow.
As the other comment already said, it’s mandatory. You won’t be able to pay health insurance without a registered address for example because they send you payment slips per mail.
You said you’ll be moving around some cities, why don’t you just stay in each for about a month and use them as bases for trips to the surrounding area? You can just get sharehouse rooms or short term apartments for one month in each city and then move on. The moving-out and moving-in procedures will be tedious, but it’s doable. And you can pay health insurance while doing the moving-out procedure.
I’m on a Working Holiday Visa myself and tbh my friend and I also planned to move around cities, but it turned out to be way too complicated, so we resorted to one-week trips to the places outside of Tokyo we want to see. Just spent last week in Hakodate and Sapporo and the five days we had felt like absolutely enough to get to know Hokkaido. Of course you might feel different about this, but maybe it’s a viable alternative for you.