Forms, forms, forms

///Sorry for posting this out late, I had a delay of writing the draft to pushing it up on the blog. I find that life's always busy the months before Christmas!///

The first three weeks of my new job are gone. I have been mainly submitting documents and copies of documents to comply with the bureaucratic procedures of starting a new job, registering for the new insurance, changing my address, registrations in the institutions and applying for the visa extension (which I am still waiting for).

There was a multitude of forms that I had to fill in. In Japanese, of course. And sometimes, even if the secretary translates them for me, I am still clueless on what I am actually asked to do. For example a field on the expenses claim form: “what information did you acquire”. What information did I acquire?

It turned out that “information acquired” is used to justify that there were some benefits of attending the conference for the claimant. You need to write half a page essay about the new things you learned so that you could claim the expenses. Makes sense. Not. I wonder if anyone checks this, and decides whether the claimant learned (“acquired information”) enough. Or everyone just writes it for the sheer sake of writing, so that the form is filled in correctly. This is "the Japanese way".

Forms, forms, forms. I hope that after the first month it will be over. I have now learned to accept this, it is not so much different from Eastern Europe where I come from. With practice of some stoicism in dealing with the bureaucracy, maybe I will become a better person?

The other major paperwork effort for me was the immigration. At the beginning the procedures did not feel much different here as compared to the previous place. In there the university officers were clueless and handled things in a wrong way, which resulted in a lot of apology-and-promise-not-to-do-it-again letter writing. The stress of the whole affair was not helped by me feeling tense about the memories of the previous situation, especially as my visa was running out mid-November.

Officers from the university admin office here also “know it all”, the same as in the previous place. Unfortunately sometimes they know it wrong. At least here I had our secretary’s help with the application. She physically went with me to submit the application, and it turned out that the documents the office prepared were not what was required.

Of course I tried explain to them beforehand what was needed (a different, more detailed versions of the documents), yet they “knew better”. So I went with their way without much arguing, even though I knew they were wrong. This is what I learned from previous experience. There is not much what I can do, it is all between one bureaucrat and another, and it is better if the Japanese handle the appropriate apologies and bowing themselves. I might do it the wrong way.

I guess the university officers' thinking was that they have a better sense of how to handle the Japanese procedures, even without reading the guidelines. It would be rude to tell them how I think they are clueless. Using Japanese bureaucratic intuition is not a replacement for reading the guidelines.

This intuition failed me for the second time. But I do not thing they would accept that the foreigner can actually grasp how to do the Japanese procedures correctly*, so I let them handle it their (wrong) way. In the end it is them who provide me with the necessary documents, so it is better that a Japanese officer tells the secretary the documents she prepared are wrong, and not me.

Only when the authority figure of an immigration officer explained to our secretary the same details about document requirements that I was trying to tell her previously, did the university officers provide me with the documents that I originally asked for. But this is the way it is here. It is the same as in the first workplace. There is a lot of incompetence among the bureaucrats, a lot of time wasting**, and it is masked under huge bureaucrats' over-confidence.

Anyway, the forms are now submitted, and I stopped worrying about immigration and can now focus now other aspects of my life that need attention***.

* I understand the details of the procedures, because they are explained in detail on the government’s website in English.
** They even have a specific phrase, often used on the news, to describe the Japanese bureaucratic ways: “wasteful administrative practices”.
*** My crazy To-Do list...