My American Husband's Japanese PR Application: 9 Months, 20+ Documents, and a Rule Change Halfway Through

My husband filed for Japanese permanent residency in August 2025.

The Japanese government rewrote the permanent residency rules in January 2026.

Nine months in, nobody can tell us which set of rules our application is being graded against.

“Hey, can you grab the residence certificate? And the tax certificate? I want to file the PR application on my day off.”

He told me this on a Tuesday. The day off was Thursday.

“Excuse me — those documents take time to get, too, you know.”

That was the easy part of this story.

The short version

• Why PR over spouse visa: He was tired of the renewals. I was tired of imagining “what happens if anything goes wrong with us.”
• Timeline: Filed August 2025. Still waiting as of May 2026 — nine months and counting.
• Cost so far: Around ¥10,000 total, including the ¥8,000 application fee and a stack of certificates. (For now. The fee cap was just raised to ¥300,000.)
• Biggest surprise: Mid-application, my husband changed jobs and we moved out of Osaka. We had to refile additional documents to Immigration.
• Bigger surprise: Mid-application, the rules changed. We may end up reviewed under the new criteria — including a possible N2 Japanese language requirement.
• Why not just keep the spouse visa: Because if anything ever happens between us, his status shouldn’t depend on me.

Why we even bothered

Honest answer: nobody applies for PR because they love bureaucracy.

People apply because they’re tired of three things:

• The renewal cycle. Every one to three years, depending on your visa.
• The “what if we ever split” calculus, which a spouse visa makes uncomfortable for both sides.
• The job and life choices you don’t realize you’re filtering through “is this OK with my visa?” — until you stop having to.

For us, the breaking point was the simplest possible thought: PR takes a long time. The spouse visa is going to expire eventually. Let’s start now, while we still have plenty of runway.

That, and the mortgage banker who casually asked, “Is your husband on PR yet?”

The paperwork: 20-ish documents, all of them tedious

My husband took this seriously. Genuinely seriously. He printed checklists. He color-coded things.

Anything tax-related, though, he handed straight to me.

• “Is this the 課税証明 or the 納税証明? They look identical.”
• “Wait — this one says ’last three years.’ This other one says ’last five years.’ Which do they actually want?”
• “It’s called ‘income certificate’ in English on the form, but it’s not the same form as the ’tax certificate.’ Explain?”

I cannot blame him. The Japanese tax document family tree is something even Japanese spouses have to Google.

The hardest part, though, wasn’t the city hall paperwork. It was the documents you have to physically request from the tax office (税務署) — a completely different building from your local ward office.

“Wait — they can’t print this at the ward office? Where even is the tax office? Is there one in this town?”

Yes. No. Yes there is. We had to drive.

The tax office documents were the final boss of paperwork prep. If anyone tells you a PR application is a one-stop shop, please be skeptical.

The full stack came out to roughly 10–20 types of documents — some several pages each. Cost-wise, under the old rules, the application fee (¥8,000) plus residence certificates, tax certificates, photos and so on ran us into the low five-figure yen range. Not painful.

That low number is about to disappear. The Japanese government has raised the application fee cap to ¥300,000. The actual fee under the new rules is reportedly being set somewhere in the ¥40,000 to ¥200,000 range. (As of May 2026. Confirm with the Immigration Services Agency before relying on this.)

A foreign acquaintance of ours had the cleanest take on this:

“If they’re raising the fees to Western levels, please raise the salaries to Western levels too.”

We have not figured out how to argue with that yet.

Filing day: lined up before the doors opened

My husband is the kind of person who arrives twenty minutes before everything. Doctor’s appointments. School pickups. Trains.

So on filing day, he stood outside the Immigration Bureau before it opened. Several other people were already there. He came home a little disappointed — the way only an early bird disappointed by even earlier birds can be.

The rule of thumb he picked up: the later you show up, the longer the wait inside. Either you arrive before the doors open, or you commit to losing the morning.

No sons in tow. No celebratory lunch. He came home, said “submitted,” and put the kettle on. Anticlimax is part of the genre.

Plot twist #1: he changed jobs mid-application

About two months after we filed, we made two decisions in one weekend: my husband would change jobs, and we would move out of Osaka to the countryside.

You can imagine how the Immigration office took the news.

We called Immigration, asked what to do, and filed additional documents — new employer details, new address, new income proof. It was extra work, but the office handled it cleanly. They are used to humans having lives.

(For anyone reading and panicking: changing jobs after filing is not a death sentence for a PR application. It does mean paperwork, and it does mean your reviewer now has to update their mental model of you. Be polite, refile fast, don’t disappear.)

Plot twist #2: the rules changed mid-application

In January 2026, the Japanese government announced a sweeping tightening of permanent residency rules. As of writing this, the headline items include:

• A Japanese language proficiency requirement — likely JLPT N2 or higher
• A standardized income threshold (around ¥3.5 million per year is the figure being discussed)
• An application fee cap raised to ¥300,000
• A 5-year visa requirement for PR applicants (from April 2027)

(Again: verify against the latest Immigration Services Agency publications before relying on any of this.)

Our application was filed in August 2025, under the old rules. As of today, nobody — not us, not our local Immigration office when we asked — can tell us with full certainty which set of criteria our pending application will be reviewed under.

So we sit and wait. My husband, who entered Japan on a work visa in 2019 and switched to a spouse visa in 2020, has now spent more time in Japan than in any single American city as an adult. He’ll likely meet N2 within the next year either way. But it would be nice to know whether he needs to.

What we’d tell other international couples

I used to think the headline advice here was “apply early, while your spouse visa still has runway.” With the rules tightening, I’m not sure that’s right anymore. Updated version:

1. Start studying Japanese now, regardless of your PR plan. N2 is going to matter — both for permanent residency and for the kinds of jobs that pay enough to clear the new income thresholds. Even without PR, N2 expands your work options.
2. Build a paper trail your Japanese spouse can verify, not just witness. When the rules change mid-application, it helps if your spouse can pull every certificate, every receipt, every prior tax filing without a four-hour archaeology session.
3. Don’t ambush your Japanese spouse with a document list two days before filing. I cannot stress this one enough.

Still waiting

It’s been nine months. Ten by the time the next mail arrives, probably.

My husband checks the postbox a little too eagerly. Our five-year-old asked last week if eijuuken was a kind of toy. Our three-year-old confidently said yes.

We don’t know yet which set of rules our application gets graded against. We don’t know how much the fee will end up being if we have to redo anything. We don’t know whether the next move is celebration ramen or a JLPT prep book.

If you’re in a similar spot, hello. We’re in the waiting room with you.

P.S. Once the result comes through, there will be a Part 2.

This is our personal experience, not financial or tax advice. Always consult a qualified professional for your situation.