Hello good people,
My wife and I have a question/want to hear your experiences about spousal visa.
Wife: Japanese national, but raised in USA. Parents are both in USA, grandparents deceased. Hasn’t lived in Japan except a couple years after highschool, but really hasn’t “adulted” in Japan.
Me: US citizen, only lived in Japan for a few years almost a decade ago.
We decided about a year ago to move to Japan. We have purchased a property in my wife’s name, paid full in cash. Purchased about a year ago.
Just after finalizing the purchase, find out wife is pregnant! We are super excited, due in February. We also want to raise our family in Japan. Baby will be born in USA, but we want to move as soon as we can after that. So we are looking at how to get my visa, which is where the trouble comes in.
The COE for a spousal visa requires her to be in Japan. We don’t want to do this, the pandemic has made us codependent, and she is pregnant.
Even after baby is born, we don’t want to split up and have the baby with one of us while she is in Japan.
I know that I’ve seen people change visa status for marriage, but we already updated her family register when we got married so it feels like being on top of our paperwork is penalizing us now 🥲
TLDR: would pregnancy and birth of a child be enough of a circumstance that when we go to Japan together, I can go on my tourist visa and apply for visa status change to spousal while there? Reading online it sounds like it is usually frowned upon, but can happen?
3 comments
This is a copy of your post for archive/search purposes.
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**Are pregnancy and childbirth circumstance enough to justify visa status change?**
Hello good people,
My wife and I have a question/want to hear your experiences about spousal visa.
Wife: Japanese national, but raised in USA. Parents are both in USA, grandparents deceased. Hasn’t lived in Japan except a couple years after highschool, but really hasn’t “adulted” in Japan.
Me: US citizen, only lived in Japan for a few years almost a decade ago.
We decided about a year ago to move to Japan. We have purchased a property in my wife’s name, paid full in cash. Purchased about a year ago.
Just after finalizing the purchase, find out wife is pregnant! We are super excited, due in February. We also want to raise our family in Japan. Baby will be born in USA, but we want to move as soon as we can after that. So we are looking at how to get my visa, which is where the trouble comes in.
The COE for a spousal visa requires her to be in Japan. We don’t want to do this, the pandemic has made us codependent, and she is pregnant.
Even after baby is born, we don’t want to split up and have the baby with one of us while she is in Japan.
I know that I’ve seen people change visa status for marriage, but we already updated her family register when we got married so it feels like being on top of our paperwork is penalizing us now 🥲
TLDR: would pregnancy and birth of a child be enough of a circumstance that when we go to Japan together, I can go on my tourist visa and apply for visa status change to spousal while there? Reading online it sounds like it is usually frowned upon, but can happen?
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Have you contacted your nearest Japanese embassy to ask if you can apply while outside of Japan?
Generally speaking there shouldn’t be an issue transitioning from tourist to spouse of a Japanese national.
Especially with a newborn baby in the mix.
That being said, life with a newborn can be extremely stressful, even without the added stress of an international relocation. With your wife’s parents in the US, do either of you have any sort of support network in Japan?