We are currently planning our move to Japan which is coming up in the next few months. Our plan is to rent a house or long term airbnb while looking for a home to purchase.
That part is rather straight forward for us, but we recently came across the proof of parking within 2km of residence rule.
We will be looking at moving to either Nagano, Saitama or Gunma area, so we will need a car, especially so as we get our life setup.
Does anyone have any advice or have found themselves in a similar situation before?
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**Advice on proof-of-parking?**
We are currently planning our move to Japan which is coming up in the next few months. Our plan is to rent a house or long term airbnb while looking for a home to purchase.
That part is rather straight forward for us, but we recently came across the proof of parking within 2km of residence rule.
We will be looking at moving to either Nagano, Saitama or Gunma area, so we will need a car, especially so as we get our life setup.
Does anyone have any advice or have found themselves in a similar situation before?
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Presumably you’ll get your long term residence set up before you get your car. If you end up in a house with a private driveway, you’d just put down your address as the location of where the car is going to park. If you’re in an apartment building and renting a parking spot in the building, you should be able to get an official document from the building with your name and the parking spot number. Failing that, you’d have to look for an available spot in one of the various private parking lots that are all over the place and figure out how to rent it (the lots usually have signage with a phone number to call) and get the slip from them.
I believe you will need some sort of identification with your address or information from the parking lot owner before getting the proof of parking space.
When we bought our car used from the dealer, they took care of everything, they just needed to know the address, showed it to us on Google Maps to confirm then they did all the paperwork to transfer ownership and registration over to us and had it all ready for us to pick up with the car.
When we moved and updated our car registration and plates we had to go to the police station and fill out a paper with the information as well as a hand drawn map, yes, hand drawn from the nearest major intersection to our parking location. Sometime over the next week a police car cruised by, confirmed there is appropriate parking at the location and a week later picked up the form.
Either way was not difficult at all, just takes time. If you don’t have someone you can borrow a car from for a couple weeks, you may need to rent something cheap while waiting but it’s not that bad.
I live in Gunma currently. It’s a fantastic place! Plenty of new houses being built here in Maebashi!
Have you got a driving license? Maybe you are planning to drive with an international license. But anyways, you could rent cars in the beginning. Share cars are really popular here, where you take a subscription and rent cars on hourly/daily basis. Much cheaper than buying and maintaining a car.