I submitted my wife's application for a permanent residence permit at the beginning of April, but have not heard anything after four months.
The Immigration and Immigration Service Agency's website states that it generally takes around four months to complete the examination, but according to the blogs of administrative scriveners, it actually seems to take from six months to a year.
My wife's residence permit expires on September 19, so I applied for a renewal on the web on August 7.
I thought I would have enough time since there are more than 40 days until the expiration date, but when I checked online, I found that the application was still “under examination”. If this continues, I will not make it before the expiration date.
If you apply for renewal, your period of stay will be extended for two months as a special exception period, so you will not be considered to be illegally staying in Japan.
However, it is not a pleasant feeling.
Why does it take so long from application to approval? I wondered if it was because the Immigration and Immigration Service Agency staff were slacking off, but since Japanese public servants are basically diligent, I doubt that they are lazy.
So I took a look at the statistical data on the Immigration Service Agency's website.
I was surprised to see the most recent data (June 2024) on “Number of applications for status of residence received and processed.
The number of applications for extension of period of stay in the Tokyo area was 149,717. The number of cases examined during the month was 58,262.
A simple calculation shows that it takes two and a half months to process all the applications received.
Even in Nagoya, Osaka, and Fukuoka, where processing is said to be relatively fast, it takes less than two months.
However, since the number of applications processed is larger than the number of new applications received, it does not appear that it will take any longer than this.
That said, it is taking too long. The processing of permanent residence permit applications is even more serious: only 1,856 applications have been processed out of a total of 47,284 received. This means that it will take more than 25 months to complete processing. Furthermore, the number of new applications received is 3,791, and the number of unprocessed applications is increasing by about 2,000 every month.
As the Japanese population declines, the government is accepting more and more foreigners from overseas, but the Immigration and Immigration Service Agency has not been able to keep up with the screening system.
In this situation, I wonder when my wife will be able to get out of her permanent residence permit. Sigh.
