> There just wasn't a whole lot of things I could think of to write for
> my "essay" to the Japanese government.
> For all I know, they looked at it and said "that is a bit brief and
> normally we'd round file this but he seems
> to be paying a lot of taxes.  Would be a shame for the government to
> lose that income.  Rubber stamp him
> and let's go to lunch."

I'm quite tempted to take the simpler route of the short essay.
Unfortunately I don't have the 8 years continuous employment,
5 years married qualifications on my side. Now that I think about it,
you were a shoe-in as far as the guidelines go.
So was your 10+ years employment, unmarried friend.
On the other  hand, I have 1.5 years of proper employment
(that's only half of the requested time according to the  guidelines)
and
4 years on JET (JET are considered to be assistants and assistant
anything is outside the guidelines).
I've prepared a semi-long, 1 or more page (I haven't edited it yet)
English essay,
and I've already started to write it in Japanese as well.
I'm hoping that will make up for my shortcomings as far as the
guidelines are concerned.
Of course, It could make everything worse as well.

On Mar 10, 9:34 am, chuckers <chucker...@gmail.com> wrote:
> On Mar 10, 2:53 am, "dame_zum...@yahoo.com" <dame_zum...@yahoo.com>
> wrote:
>
> > On Mar 9, 12:54 pm, chuckers <chucker...@gmail.com> wrote:
> >  > Mine was 3-5 sentences.
>
> > Hmmmmm... If I'd've known that would be sufficient, I might've tried
> > it. But I got the impression that "a dissertation the size of War and
> > Peace written in 漢文" would be essential, and I've failed dismally at
> > writing essays even in English....
>
> > Oh well. That's academic now.
>
> One of the main reasons I graduated from Uni was so that I wouldn't
> have to write essays anymore.
>
> There just wasn't a whole lot of things I could think of to write for
> my "essay" to the Japanese government.
> For all I know, they looked at it and said "that is a bit brief and
> normally we'd round file this but he seems
> to be paying a lot of taxes.  Would be a shame for the government to
> lose that income.  Rubber stamp him
> and let's go to lunch."
>
> In actual fact, I was unemployed for about a month when my self
> address postcard showed up at my door.
> Care was taken NOT to mention that fact when I went back out to
> immigration.  Stayed unemployed for another
> 4 months or so after that but made sure I was paying my nenkin and tax
> bill.  Health insurance was covered
> by an extension from my previous employer's health plan and that was
> kept up to date as well.