I am moving to Japan with my family in August (hooray!), and I’ve managed to tie my brain in knots over the timing of COE, visa, and flights. I’m going to lay out my restrictions and reasoning. I would appreciate any feedback on how reasonable this is and if there are better ways to go about it.
Background: I’ll be entering Japan for a faculty position (HSP visa) that starts 1 Sept. Ideally, we (partner + child) would move early-mid August to get over jetlag, find a residence, and sign up for school. Relocation is NOT covered for me (b/c academics…), and I’d really like to get NYC to Tokyo flights booked soon to keep costs down.
The awesome admin handling my COE has let me know it will be 2 weeks until submission by their office, 4-8 weeks processing time, and 1 week to ship the hard copy COE. The NYC consulate takes 4-7 days to process a visa, plus another 1-2 days mailing time on each side.
Thus, the earliest I will have visas in hand is August 7th or so, with the potential for it to be delayed 4+ weeks for processing time and more for anything going wrong. I’m considering hedging my bets and getting changeable (not refundable) plane tickets for sometime during the week of the 14th of August. If it works, perfect. If it doesn’t, I’ll have to pay the ticket difference to switch (and potentially a change fee), which is what I would have to pay anyways if I chose to wait instead. Is this reasonable?
How did anyone else handle this issue with timing? My start date is not moveable, as it is tied to the school semester. Does getting changeable plane tickets work or is it annoying and full of hidden fees? I’ve never tried before. Any feedback is appreciated!
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This is a copy of your post for archive/search purposes.
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**Sanity check on timeline to move: COE -> visa -> flights**
I am moving to Japan with my family in August (hooray!), and I’ve managed to tie my brain in knots over the timing of COE, visa, and flights. I’m going to lay out my restrictions and reasoning. I would appreciate any feedback on how reasonable this is and if there are better ways to go about it.
Background: I’ll be entering Japan for a faculty position (HSP visa) that starts 1 Sept. Ideally, we (partner + child) would move early-mid August to get over jetlag, find a residence, and sign up for school. Relocation is NOT covered for me (b/c academics…), and I’d really like to get NYC to Tokyo flights booked soon to keep costs down.
The awesome admin handling my COE has let me know it will be 2 weeks until submission by their office, 4-8 weeks processing time, and 1 week to ship the hard copy COE. The NYC consulate takes 4-7 days to process a visa, plus another 1-2 days mailing time on each side.
Thus, the earliest I will have visas in hand is August 7th or so, with the potential for it to be delayed 4+ weeks for processing time and more for anything going wrong. I’m considering hedging my bets and getting changeable (not refundable) plane tickets for sometime during the week of the 14th of August. If it works, perfect. If it doesn’t, I’ll have to pay the ticket difference to switch (and potentially a change fee), which is what I would have to pay anyways if I chose to wait instead. Is this reasonable?
How did anyone else handle this issue with timing? My start date is not moveable, as it is tied to the school semester. Does getting changeable plane tickets work or is it annoying and full of hidden fees? I’ve never tried before. Any feedback is appreciated!
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My relocation was paid for, but we didn’t book flights until my COE was approved, I think. Fortunately, the processing time was even faster than the stated 4-8 weeks, and I was approved in about 3 weeks in December for HSP with 75 points. I flew 2 weeks before my first day of work, and stayed in temp housing for a month while I was house hunting. It was kind of all wild first 8 weeks before it felt like things finally started to settle down.
I think the fees depend on what airline you’re flying, so I’d just check their policy before you commit.
So I can’t help much with timeline but here are two things:
Ask if the COE can be emailed instead of getting a hard copy as that will save time. I know it can be emailed but it might not be applicable in your situation so inquire into it if you haven’t yet.
About flights, prices change all the time basically. You don’t have to book so far in advance, one month is enough, even less than that. I’ve had a roundtrip flight to Japan tracked on Google flights at around $900 (I’m around Europe tho) and then it went up to $1100 and then back down and so on. The flight is now about 3 days away and it’s at $900 again. You can try a similar thing.
>I’m considering hedging my bets and getting changeable (not refundable) plane tickets for sometime during the week of the 14th of August.
That’ll be probably the single most expensive time to travel to Japan all year. Obon holiday is roughly the 13th to 16th. Huge numbers of companies shut down and people travel to their home towns. You’ll be fighting massive crowds and won’t really be able to get anything useful done anyway.
Hello fellow academic family! We made the same move (basically) in 2021. Unfortunately that was a… very different time, so I can’t give concrete help on timelines. I will say that I originally bought tickets in June, for August, and ended up having to to reschedule to September due to processing delays. Obviously that timeline sucked. I think we just paid whatever processing fees we had to for changing the ticket— but at that time JAL was pretty flexible if I recall. Again, a different time.
I will say though that you should be sure you can extend your “temporary lodgings” if you need to. We ended up needing 1.5 months at our long-term hotel/furnished apartment as the process of finding an apartment, applying, having one application fall through, finding another places, transferring funds, and then ordering furniture, washing machine, refrigerator, etc took quite a while! Especially with a young kid in tow (everything takes longer, we needed more breaks, etc), and I wasn’t about to move my kid into an apartment without a fridge, bed, etc.
FYI we also used a service to help us with renting, finding schools, etc. It wasn’t entirely necessary, especially as I speak Japanese, but it was great to basically have an “assistant” who compiled spreadsheets of apartments and schools with all the info (in English) so that I could just share it with my partner and not have to do any translation for him. I’d be happy to share the name if it is useful to you.