Whose number? Your number?
The other day I applied for a plastic My Number card online. Despite all my reservations and blog posts about how much I dislike the system, I finally cracked. The final straw was the fact that the 通知票 are no longer valid if the address has changed since they were issued, and our address has changed.
Shinsei locked my account and their system only accepts uploads of the plastic cards or 通知票 that have the correct address. I called them up and it seems to be possible to use a jyuuminhyou to provide your My Number information, but you can only do so in a branch or by mail, and of course every time this comes up you need to go and get a new copy of your jyuuminhyou.
Fine. You win, Japanese government.
There is a slight positive to having a plastic My Number card, especially once they figure out how to let us use them as health insurance cards: mine has my kanji alias on it, so hopefully I can get clinics to stop calling me by my full passport name instead of my preferred kanji name.
Applying Online
I was pleasantly surprised by this. Of course, being a Japanese government website it is neither clear nor elegant, but it doesn’t take too long to navigate and the whole process only took me about five minutes from start to finish.
First, go to this My Number portal page.
Then you need to find this page to apply using your smartphone (although I did it using a computer). It would of course be too easy to make a big button that gets you here, instead I found myself clicking through a Kafkaesque maze of links that seemed to lead back onto themselves.
Once there, you need to type in your My Number (heh) twice, your name, date of birth and email address. The system will send you an email and you click on the link in it to confirm your email address and go to the next step.
Which is to upload a selfie. You need to take a picture of yourself not wearing a hat, not smiling/showing teeth (typical Japanese government photo), confirm a couple of things, then finish the application.
If there is a problem they will email you within a week or so, if it goes well your local city hall or ward office will send you a notification to come and pick your card up.
It was a surprisingly easy and quick process.
Let’s see if we run into any problems before actually getting the card.
My family and I actually did the same process online a couple months ago. Got the hagaki postcards in the postal mail and went to pick them up. Was a pretty painless process. At least there was no fee to receive them.
Now we are mere “numbers”. Haha.
Note for others who want to create a MyNumber card: If you are on a visa, the MyNumber card will expire the same day as the visa. Additionally, if you renew it too late, you have to pay a fee.
They told me about this after I went through all the trouble to create the card, only to be told to come back in a few months…
Same boat. You can’t even update your card the day you renew your visa because “the information isn’t in their system yet.” Of course it’s not, that would make too much sense.
There is I believe another small advantage if we apply for the plastic card. 5000yen in points or something.
So I hope to get the points, and spend them on something. I think for use it works out at 15,000 yen.
Thanks for the article!
The direct link to register does not seem to work anymore. Could you share the links/buttons to click on from the homepage of the portal?
Thanks!
Yeah, sorry about that. The website seems to be super unfriendly in that it uses cookies and won’t allow links to the actual forms, just the main site. Your best bet is just to go through the link click until you find the page that allows you to manually input your information. I would like to tell you how I did it but there was definitely a random, magical element to it.
Alternatively, if you still have the original paperwork your tsuchihyou came with, there should be a QR code on there that makes everything easier 🙂
The visible alias bit is nice, I use it everywhere since I got it more than a few years back.
Of course, banks have now started cracking down on it and only allow the name from the zairyu card to be used. That’s very annoying.
Special price to Prestia, which explicitly doesn’t say that foreigners HAVE to use zairyu card. It’s on the list of possible ID’s but never it is mentioned that they actually want to see it. Only when they come back to you they confess that yeah I have to submit the residence card.
I used mynubmer and health insurance card combo, nope no cigar.
I started the application process but the system requires some “app” functionality to be installed first in order to proceed. This means the government wants to install something on my computer. Is anyone suspicious about it?
I don’t remember that step! There may have been cookies involved but otherwise it was just data entry and uploading a photo.
I just did it in person.
“one of us, one of us”…
The touch screen you use when collecting the card has the worst user interface I’ve seen in decades. It really should win an IT version of the Razzies. You just reach a point when you start to doubt this being more general incompetence and apathy and start harboring dark thoughts about their nefarious intent.
BTW, you’re supposed to declare a myriad of passcodes and passwords but they will likely only ask for 2.
One is 4 digit pin and one a password. They’ll give you a form with space for more but we know Japan forms can’t be revised once they are decided upon.
And the password has to include both english letters and numbers. Not that their documentation or on-screen guidance (ha!) says that.
I applied for mine in person at City Hall almost a year ago. Issued on the spot. Took about 10minutes.
My Japanese partner finally applied online a month ago. Still waiting.