Trying to Explain Red Tape

One of my least favorite things about living abroad is the periodic need to renew my visa, get a new residents card, or any other of the many tedious, red tape laden hoops that I must jump through in order to remain legally in the country. Part of the difficulty lies in dragging the people responsible for keeping me here (that’s my employers) through that red tape in a language they don’t understand particularly well.

Legalese is a pain and a half, no matter where you’re from. And for some reason Japanese is particularly difficult to tease the meaning out of. Admittedly a (big) part of it is my linguistic shortcomings, but when I plug in half a dozen mystery words into the dictionary I expect at least more than one identical meaning to pop out. Sometimes you luck out and the form provided is bilingual, but when English is provided it’s not really English. While it is better than the excellent shopping bag English faux-pas plastered over the Internet, it is often difficult to parse out exactly what they want. For Example, question 23 on the current form for extension of a visa.

What it says: Total period of receiving the foreign language education when you teach the foreign language. (外国語による教育をしようとする場合は当該外国語により教育を受けた期間。) It took me a little while of playing with the dictionary to figure out that what they probably meant to ask was more along the lines of: If you’re teaching a foreign language, how many years were you educated in that language? At least I really hope that’s what they meant. Otherwise the man at immigration is going to expect me to have amazing French.

Then there’s the added layer of cultural expectations. Most of my most difficult communication experiences have happened in some sort of formal customer service situation, particularly in the city hall or immigration. There’s one or two employees hired to work behind these various counters. Do they speak English? Never. In Japan, if you want to find someone to speak English with you go to Costco. Apparently they snap them all up before they can sign away their souls to a lifetime of dull but amply funded government drudgery. Immigration has zero English, not even signage or an automated phone message.

So here’s some poor man behind the counter elbow deep in forms covered in legalese. In America this person would probably dumb down the explanations to help you fill out the form correctly and get you out the door. In Japan speaking simply is seen as speaking rudely, and so you get these poor government officials getting all sweaty and nervous re-explaining the forms over and over in increasingly polite spirals of Japanese. Polite Japanese is hard even for Japanese people to understand. How little old me with my two years of formal study is supposed to understand is beyond me. And then when things really start to break down and you start to beg for basic directions “is it A or B?” your cry for help is more likely to be met with a regurgitation from an obtuse rule book. (I am beginning to suspect they just memorized the rule book without figuring out what all those vague guidelines actually mean.)

So there’s are all these obscure and confusing forms and rules for accomplishing even the simplest procedure. And not only do I have to figure all this out for me and my husband and daughter, I also have to explain it to my supervisor at work so that I can beg off work to take care of all of this red tape during government office hours. (Six seconds on every third Tuesday with a full hour of availability on the second full moon of the year.)

The back and forth has been dizzying and I’m still suspicious that the poor lady at the office has yet to grasp any of my explanations, in Japanese or English since she keeps sending me the same basic outline of directions without addressing any of my questions. I don’t blame her either. Not for one second. I just wish someone would send me magical red tape cutting scissors for my birthday.

They’d sure come in handy as I wade through a hellish two months of paperwork for child payment renewals, visa extensions for three people, new residence cards for the family, and an attempt at a local tax refund because no one at city hall can seem to wrap their head around the fact that house husband is indeed a thing.


Arrrrgh.