A Few Suggestions to Make Immigration Processing Smoother in Japan

Every time the author travels to the immigration office here in Tokyo, he cannot avoid the feeling that the place is almost designed to spite foreigners living in this fair city. Situated in the midst of the city's commercial warehouse area right next to the Port and stacks of shipping containers, the brutalist concrete monstrosity seems to swallow thousands of foreigners living across the city and the surrounding region, away from the preying sight of locals who no doubt would feel unease from seeing such huge congregations of foreigners in one place.

Inside the building, massive lines snacks across every waiting room and corridor, directing people to different windows and lines based on purpose of their visit. Amusement park-esque waiting times up to two hours or more are casually put up in the corridors, much to the frustration of the many confused people who are visiting the massive place for the first time, and have trouble communicating in either Japanese or English. In a country known for friendly service and politeness, the employees are terse and pokerfaced, perhaps worn out by seemingly endless streams of applicants for this and that.

It is not that the system does not work.  Coming from the US, the bureaucracy here can be more efficient. Offices handling foreigners in the US can be much colder, even hostile, handling even more applicants with fewer staff, all under a government that is increasingly intolerant and arbitrary toward, at least verbally, the people who cram into the place for paperwork. Compared to the American system, the Japanese system, under a government increasingly more friendly to foreigners (albeit from a rather low base) can be rather tolerable.

But maybe because of the increasing friendliness toward foreign residents, the Japanese system is becoming more stretched. The immigrant building, even with its immense size, feels inadequately small when hordes of foreigners descend upon it every morning. Staff members work fast and the windows are fully staffed, but there simply just not enough windows to process various applications to ensure waiting times are reasonably short. There just are too many foreigners now compared to what the processing center is originally designed for.

A two-pronged solution can be put forward for problem of the overcrowded immigration center. On one hand, more investment is needed for more processing power. Why only set up one big facility in Tokyo when foreigners reside all over the city. More efficient is a network of offices across the city that serve contingent of foreigners living in the immediate vicinity. Such network can take pressure off the main immigration processing center while make it much easier and cheaper for foreigners to make the trip to the bureaucracy.

However, establishing more offices and staffing them with more bureaucrats are expensive for a government that is already handling too much debt. Certainly some degree of increase in manpower is necessary to handle the larger numbers of foreign residents. Yet it is simply unsustainable to continue increasing processing staff as the country learn to embrace more and more foreign workers. More productivity needs to be squeezed out of the current processing system to handle more people to keep the cost of handling foreigners manageable.

The productive solution is a systematic simplification of the different permissions that foreigners need in Japan. For instance, it is extra work for a student to separately apply for permission to work part-time, easier would be to automatically grant the permission to work part-time for foreign students. Such simplification would open up staff members who can be redirected to absolutely essential paperwork. Consolidating the overall foreign residency regime can then speed up the bureaucracy for everyone.

Better yet, the bureaucracy can introduce more online procedure for applications, allowing people to apply for permits and other authorizations remotely from the comfort of their respective homes. Fewer people pushing physically through the immigration processing center can certainly reduce the stress of the staff and in turn allow for more smooth functioning of the center. Perhaps some part of the process can even be outsourced to cheaper foreign BPO firms. A long term prospect, maybe, but certainly a good first step to take to make life easier for foreigners stressed out about their visas.