Becoming a “Permanent Resident” in Japan

After 759 days in Japan — 3,961 days since my first of many visits began — I was granted “permanent resident” status (PR).

This concludes a process I committed to in late 2023, and formally initialized in mid 2024.

  • enter Japan on an HSP visa with 80+ points (see this blog post for details)
  • live in Japan and hold the 80+ points for one year
  • apply for PR
  • don’t mess anything up while under review
  • get PR → live in Japan and be flexible in how I work

In the following, I’m going to describe my experience with the whole PR acquisition process. Thoughts about the system itself, technical hurdles and tips, surprises, etc.
For a start, here’s a timeline with some spoilers regarding the content that follows.

Timeline

  • Start the clock
    • 2024-06-14: Arrive in Japan with HSP visa
    • 2024-07-01: Start working
  • After one year of work
    • 2025-07-01: Collect documents
    • 2025-07-14: Submit application
  • Leap of faith
    • 2026-03-01: Reduce work hours to 32 h per week
    • 2026-03-06: Send notice about work contract change
  • Better than just waiting I guess?
    • 2026-06-29: Request for more documents arrives
    • 2026-06-30: Send more documents
  • The Postcard
    • 2026-07-10: Receive the postcard
    • 2026-07-13: Pick up new residence card

In a whole lot more detail …

Why get PR

Why getting PR as fast as possible was a goal for me.

I wanted to try out living in Japan. But I’m also a person that highly values time for personal use. So here’s a problem: if my permission to stay in the country is tied to my work contract, I’m not in a favorable position to negotiate work conditions — especially for things that are uncommon here; like reduced work hours or an increase in days off instead of an increase in salary.

Therefore the plan: enter Japan → do the ordinary salaryman thing → get PR → individualize work style.

(If you’ve looked at the timeline above, you’ll notice things did not go according to plan. ^_^’)

Additional factors for getting PR early

  • Japan does not allow dual citizenship, so I’d want to get PR at some point anyway. Therefore, best get it early on and avoid the hassle of continuous residence permit renewals.
  • While I couldn’t have foreseen this one: the fee for getting PR will be increased by 1,900% this year (not a typo; new fee is twenty times as high as the current one).

How to get PR

Background and basic considerations.

Immigration law states you may be granted the status of “permanent resident” if

  • you’re of good conduct,
  • you have the means to support yourself,
  • and you becoming a permanent resident is in the interest of Japan.

Source: 入管法 > 第22条（永住許可）

The Immigration Services Agency additionally determines that you can apply

  • after 10 years of residence in general
  • after 5 years if, e.g., you’re a refugee, or made special contributions to the country
  • after 3 years if, e.g., you have 70+ HSP points
  • after 1 year if you have 80+ HSP points, or are the spouse of a Japanese national or permanent resident and have been married for at least 3 years

Source: 永住許可に関するガイドライン

Above “fast lanes” are the result of Japan deciding in 2016 to try to attract highly skilled professionals:

  • 「優秀な人材を海外から呼び込みたいと思います。このため、永住権取得までの在留期間を世界最短とします。」
  • “We want to attract outstanding talent from overseas. To this end, we will shorten the period of residence required to obtain permanent residency to the shortest in the world.”

Source: 平成28年4月19日 産業競争力会議 (warp.ndl.go.jp / archive.org)

What you have to submit for the application varies based on your individual circumstances and may change in the future. Generally speaking (as above statutes would suggest), you show that you’re a law-abiding citizen, always pay your taxes on time, are financially stable, and make a case for why you should get PR.

One thing that rubbed me the wrong way, is that you need a guarantor. They sign a document that reads: “I hereby guarantee to provide [the applicant] with necessary support to fulfill his/her civic duty and to abide by Japanese laws and regulations during his/her stay in Japan”. (Japanese / English)
… I thought in my application I was making a case for me being able to hold my own? Guess not.

Two considerations to make early on, are

  • apply on your own or hire a scrivener/immigration lawyer (because it’s a bunch of non-trivial paper work)
  • how to handle translation of documents (you’re likely to hand in non-Japanese documents like graduation certificates, for which you have to provide a Japanese translation)

I decided to do everything on my own.

Preparing documents

Not impossible without MS Windows 🤡.

Japan loves its forms crafted in Excel, and the Immigration Services Agency is no exception to that.

Fortunately, most forms you’ll need are provided in Excel and PDF format. So you can just use the latter. Unfortunately, the HSP point calculation form (from here) is only available as an Excel file. When I initially applied for the HSP visa, I had a Windows VM on my work machine that I used for filling it out. This time, the “solution” I found is that you can “print” Excel sheets online on acrobat.adobe.com. So I created an account with a throwaway e-mail address, printed the sheet I needed, and worked with the PDF from there.

For filling out PDF forms, usually any old PDF viewer or even browser does the job. For the PR application, however, I wanted a process that’d allow me to manage form entries in a more sophisticated way. What I found to be suitable albeit not ideal for the job is Xournal++. While primarily a tool for handwriting on PDFs, it does also support typing text. What makes it great, is that it saves annotations separately from the PDF in simple gzipped XMLs (i.e. gzipped plain text).

This makes it possible to do all the good plain text things with your form entries

  • Version control (with a gzip -cd clean filter and gzip -d smudge filter in git)
  • Search and replace
  • Edit in vim
  • etc. etc.

Also makes it easy to align text pixel perfect by just setting x and y attributes in the save file’s XML nodes.

For translating all my German and English documents, I wanted an efficient way to create versions with the layout unchanged; i.e. the Japanese text laid over the original. Since I didn’t find any suitable software, I created a Python script that, given the original document and a file with the translated text, creates an SVG with the translated text lines on semi-transparent white rectangles, which then can quickly be positioned and scaled to fit above the corresponding original text.

Overall, my translation workflow was

  • OCR the document with OCRmyPDF using the --sidecar option to get a plain text file
  • translate the plain text file
  • run the script
  • position texts in Inkscape

Submit, wait, communicate

Peculiarities of the Immigration Services Agency / Immigration Bureau.

For your submission, (1) make sure you approach the application counter with all documents ready to be handed over as is, and (2) don’t expect any peace of mind regarding completeness or correctness.
I assumed there’d be a basic check of the documents and a “we can’t make promises but looks complete and in order” type of feedback. What actually happened, is that I was only asked to show that I have the acknowledgement form (Japanese / English) signed. Nothing more. To do so, I shuffled through my 58 page application, spotted the form, and put it on top. Then immediately the application was to be handed in, so I hurriedly put the documents (which at this point still had small post-it note bookmarks between them to separate sections) back together. To my dismay, this was the last I saw of the application. No chance to check if I had put everything back in a sensible order, no peace of mind that everything looked complete.
Given the application went through, things must have been in a state they could work with, but for the first few days after submission, I was really worried I could’ve negatively impacted things by handing in documents in a possibly confusing order and looking sloppy with the post-its still on them.

Speaking of worrying about negatively impacting the outcome of my application, I reduced my work hours from 40 to 32 per week. Initially I had planned to do this once I got PR. But after seven months of waiting — and aided in the decision by my body really not happy with prolonged desk work at the time — I took the risk. As a last possible “way out”, I looked into whether or not I actually had to notify immigration about the work hour change. According to this FAQ:
Ｑ１２　所属機関は変わりませんが、契約内容が変わりました。届出が必要ですか。
Ａ　　　届出は不要です。活動機関や契約機関が変わった場合に届出をお願いします。
which is not specific to the time between PR application and result, but regarding what changes to let immigration know about in general, a mere contract change while staying employed at the same place does not require notification. To be sure though, I called the immigration bureau and asked: same employer, same type of work, but my salary and work hours changed; need a notification? I was told to send one. (I assume for questions like mine they heavily lean towards asking for a notice, rather than actually checking whether or not it’s necessary according to the rules.)

Side note: reducing my work hours meant my HSP points were different at each of the following points.

  • 105 when I applied for the HSP visa
  • 115 when I applied for PR
    • +10 Master → PhD
    • +5 work experience 3–4 years → 5–6 years
    • -5 age 30–34 → 35–39
  • 110 when I received PR
    • -5 for the decrease in annual salary

Side side note:

  • You can find my LaTeX templates for the notification letter as well as the HSP point supporting documents here.

So I sent the notification about my changed work contract, waited another four months (eleven in total at this point), and then received a letter from immigration … asking for more documents. Fortunately, they just wanted salary statements for the last 12 months. Sent them right the next day, and just a week and a bit later, I got the postcard.
The thing about the postcard is that it does not tell you the result of your application. It informs you that there is a result. Not, though, what the result is. The postcard told me to bring 10,000 Yen in revenue stamps, which is only necessary when you receive PR, so I basically knew I had it … but I would not celebrate before I held that new residence card in my hands. Since the postcard arrived on a Friday afternoon, I had to wait for Monday. Went to the immigration bureau first thing in the morning, and then finally it was done.

New card, new design, new chapter

A nice small surprise was that my new residence card is the recently introduced pink type (bottom last page here), which has to be renewed not every seven years (which was the case before), but ten. So, unless some new mandatory card type is introduced at some point, I’m all set until 2036.

Peace of mind.

May there be plenty of exciting new developments, fun experiences, and good times had — shared in various degrees of detail through plenty of blog posts! Updates regarding life in Japan will, as before, be tagged #JPpr.

See you around!

2026-07-25