It’s quite awkward not having a mobile phone (keitai denwa in Japanese). OK, so people got by without them for many many years, but most people these days expect to be in contact and so making very firm arrangements about exactly when and where to meet tends to be less of an issue. You just assume that you can call on the way or when you get there and find each other.

Knowing this in advance, and knowing that my UK mobile phone wouldn’t work in Japan (which has a different set of frequencies and protocols to both Western Europe and the US) I expected to buy a pre-pay mobile phone once I got here. I tried that in the first full week I was here but then discovered that in order to buy a pre-pay phone I have to have my “resident alien” certificate. To get a  contract phone, I’d have to have a bank account and this probably (I haven’t checked) would also need this certificate. This requires me to attend the local “Ward Office”. So, I had to wait to get a phone until I had the certificate. I finally got around to travelling to the local ward office (one stop up the train line then not too far to walk). From somewhere (I can’t remember where and can’t find it now) I had the message “It may take up to an hour to get your certificate). So, I went along prepared for a long-ish wait. I didn’t really have to wait. There were two people dealing with applications for resident alien certificates and only one other applicant when I arrived. So, having filled in all the forms, with a bit of back and forth with the helpful lady behind the counter, I was given a form telling me that I had to go back to that office between 14th and 21st February – three weeks from now!

Arrgh. What the information I had obviously meant was that it might take an hour to APPLY for the certificate (it may also take up to an hour when I go back to collect it). In between it’s going to take weeks to process.

It’s now very tempting to ask one of my Japanese friends to buy a pre-pay phone and sell it to me. That might be illegal, though, until I’ve got my certificate, so maybe they could just lend it to me until then.

Maybe I should have realised the  length of time this sort of thing would take given how long my visa eligibility certificate application took to process, and the fact that the JLPT (Japanese Language Proficiency Test) takes four months to mark even though it’s obviously computer-processed.