Fun with Forms

When we first arrived in Kyoto, we needed to do several things to establish ourselves as Alien Residents of Japan. These tasks included getting Alien Registration cards (You CANNOT smile in these photos. I think that's hilarious!) , setting up both National health insurance and supplemental health insurance and opening a bank account. With these goals met, we could then branch out to crazy things like getting paid a salary or setting up utilities.

With the help of Rieko and our landlords, we then sent in several forms to set up our accounts (and auto-payments) with gas, electric, phone, water and internet providers only to have basically all of them sent back to us with corrections required. Some were returned several times!

Here are some of the fun bureaucratic red tape issues we had with our Japanese forms.

• Writing our name "First Last" instead of "Last, First"
• Writing my name instead of Chris's name and vice versa
  
• Using Katakana but not Romanji script and vice versa (You often need to use both)
  
• Using both Katakana and Romanji when you were only supposed to use one of them
  
• Signing the proper name in the obvious places, but not in one additional location
  
• Being told our signatures on the form do not look enough like the ones on file with the bank - even though we wrote both of them
• And today... writing our name in both Romanji and Katakana in "Last, First" instead of "Last, First, Middle". Are you kidding me? Middle names are supposed to be optional. :)
  

I understand now why it is a Japanese custom to get a hanko stamp to use as a signature. Fewer headaches, to be sure!