I often heard and read that getting married is relatively easy and quick in Japan at your city ward.
I even know of at least two people where one of the two people weren’t even available during the actual wedding process. (In both cases one of them was on a business trip they couldn’t skip)
Now my question is, is it even possible to get married here that easily while one of the two people does not live in Japan yet (no visa or residence card).
Basically; I with my visa and residence card (and all the documents) go to the city ward, and a bit later me and my fiancee are officially married, even though she is still on the other side of the planet without officially living here yet?
(and I wonder if this process will work out properly at all with my still limited language profiency…)
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In my case 2 foreigners, I had work visa and my wife I believe was tourist I think. It wasn’t that easy at all. It depends on your country and her country.
We had to go for interview in Osaka, I believe it was judge center (not office yard), and interviewed separated , later they checked both sides. it took around one month to get the papers for approval.
They did say it was their first time with those two nationalities getting married in japan lol.
I’m not sure about registering if she doesn’t have some kind of visa.
I know it’s possible for a resident/citizen to register the marriage alone, as long as all the correct documents are present.
However, they need to see her physical passport and want a copy of it when you register, along with a translation in Japanese, so she’d at least need to be in the country. Or she’d have to mail her passport to you.
She also has to sign paperwork. But I guess you could mail it to her and she mail it back?
I would email your local city hall and ask them if they can marry someone on a tourist visa. I really feel like your partner needs to at least be in country. Then she could go back to her country and you could start the application for a dependent visa for her.
Also, I don’t know your country, but apparently some embassies will marry you at the embassy.
In our case Japan has nothing to do with it.
To elaborate more, you need to adhere to whatever country you both are from, be done with it and then ‘report’ it to the Japanese City hall. So this opens up a question how easy are your both countries in getting marriage visa first.
We did it. I had a student visa, he was under tourist visa. We are both from the same country.
Went to the ward office where they told us it was not possible and go do it at your embassy, which is not possible. Our Japanese friend started yelling and a boss came around, and gave us a list of everything we needed.
We went on the wedding day with our witnesses. We signed everything and then they said, they were sending it to the interior affairs ministry and to wait for their OK, as they could not say we were married.
One month later I was invited to an interview (DH was already back home), I went with my computer to show our facebook history, my country’s ID and a copy of his showing we used to live together there before I moved to Japan, tons of pictures I printed at the conbini showing him as part of my family (I looked for pictures with my nieces and nephews where you could see the passing time, etc). Then they said that I Had to wait and even if it took a year, not to marry to each other again or we would be committing a crime.
He was requested to send a new sworn certificate that he was single back home.
One month later, we were officially married. Then Immigration would not take that Japanese certificate because they thought we faked the wedding, as we are both from the same country and it made no sense to marry in Japan. So we hired a lawyer back home, who started the process to register our marriage there (it would take a year), and he also wrote a letter in Japanese (he was Japanese descendant) stating that. And voila, he got his visa.
We had the certificate of our marriage from back home before the expiration of his first visa. After that, no problems.
My advice is not to do it this way it was extremely stressful and it turned a happy event into a nightmare.
Getting married is easy, yes, but the process to get there is a nightmare…
In our case, my wife has a perm visa, I came here as a tourist. We’re both from different countries, and I can tell you, getting all the necessary documents, with translations, some with apostilles, is just awful and costs a lot if time and money.
I had to extend my tourist visa to get everything and it was still a close call.
Once we had everything though, it was smooth sailing, we went to the city hall, filled one document, gave them everything, had to wait for about 20-30 minutes, and done. 3 days later (usually it takes around a week) we got our marriage certificate.
My country has a system for “absence marriage”, so usually people will do that from outside of Japan, then use the marrige certificate from our country to get their spouse visa just fine. If you comes from the same country, why not do it back home?
Basically you have to establish that neither of you have impediments to marriage which can be a pain depending on how (if) you can do that in your home country.
That’s getting married. Getting the visa is something else, and requires more than just legal marriage.