kuri <cc@dotmel.cam> wrote:
> In Osaka, at city halls and immigration offices, they have forms translated
> in eigo/chinese/portuguese/you name it, they say your gaijin card must carry
> the same names + number as your passport

Hi, that looks to me like an attempt at reducing/preventing fraud:
forged ARCs (indicating increased illegal immigration) are supposedly a
growing problem for the Japanese government, and i just read somewhere
that plans are underfoot to introduce a new style of harder to forge
ARC. Surely Osaka and Tokyo would have to have some of the toughest
immigration offices in the country, quite like Montreal and Toronto in
Canada.

> and if you don't do all that they
> want (tell them each time you change of passport/name/sex...), your risk a
> fine and up to 6 months of jail.

I am not surprised...

> I wouldn't want an alias on my official card.
> [...] for family reasons, I had to send copies of documents to my country,
> and the contracts that didn't carry my romaji name couldn't be used

Right, that could pose problems. One would in any case need to think
carefully about one's choice, since what one person may find
advantageous is not necessarily so for somebody else. Fortunately i have
not yet run into any situation like the one you describe.

Incidentally, as the consequence of me having changed cultures/
languages/ countries before i have had the pleasure of going to the then
Soviet Union on different occasions with visas issued in different
names. People's perception of my "real name" often depends on how they
pronounce the letters they see on paper, and since my name, like many,
perhaps most, other names, is read differently in different languages,
there are several ways it can be written in Cyrillic characters or
katakana. I know a Frenchman with an originally German family name
(spelled "weiss") who lives on one of the smaller islands in Okinawa.
His last name is written in katakana like "be-su". One could as easily
write it as "ve-su" (French, more closely approximated), "vaisu"
(German) or "wi-su" (English), and if he had assumed German or British
citizenship and then gone to Japan, he would have ended up with one of
those other two katakana versions. So what's his "real name"? Playing
with bureaucracy can be so much fun.

Al (learning new things avery day)

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