RetireJapan

The office definitely does not keep your passport.
They will most likely staple a piece of paper in your passport with your case info and number. At least that is what happened in my case. That is how you can contact them and ask about the status.

Not recent, but just to increase the available data: I applied in February 2006 and it came through in September of the same year. They stamped my passport with the application date and number, but didn't keep anything.

There isn’t any formal requirement to even HAVE a passport. Some people don’t renew their passports if they plan to live here and not travel abroad.

Anyway, they didn’t keep mine. The process took five months (spouse to PR). The thing they were most interested in was evidence of resident tax payment. Goodness knows what else they spent so long checking...

Belated thanks to everyone who responded to this.

Having found a number of reasons to put it off, I still haven't actually applied for PR yet, and I'm now looking again at the required documents and finding all sorts of potential problems ahead. Before I call my kuyakusho and the immigration office and no doubt confuse both them and myself, I have another question I was wondering if anyone could answer.

Did anybody successful in their application for PR use their spouse as the guarantor - and was your spouse unemployed?

I ask because I was going to use my wife as my guarantor but I note that I have to provide proof of her income for the last year... the problem here is that she only started working in April, having been studying for a masters the two years before that. I imagine a lot of foreigners use their spouse as their guarantor, but I worry that the lack of a full-year of income would be reason for my application to be rejected (i.e. she wouldn't be considered able to support me financially). Does anyone have any experience in this? If I can't use my wife I need to think about someone else and it's tricky because the guarantor needs to provide proof of income, juminhyo etc.

Any help would be appreciated. Thanks!

My wife was my guarantor--that's what I was advised to do by the immigration office.
At that time she wasn't working--she was staying at home looking after our baby. (She had been employed full-time before that though.)

My spouse was my guarantor and she had zero income.

Don’t tie yourself up in knots about this. It’s a reasonably straightforward procedure. The immigration office will tell you what extra information they need, if any. Just submit the forms and let the system grind away...

In my case they called me a few weeks later to ask for my latest residents tax payments documents which I had to get from City Hall.

As long as you’ve got a stable source of reasonable income, have paid your taxes and have no criminal convictions (including, apparently driving fines) you should be absolutely fine. Just get on with it.

I got mine with driving fines -didn't come up during the process

Interesting. Another myth debunked!

I suspect it's one of those Japan rules that only comes into play when they don't like you and need a reason to turn you down...

lol!

I still wanna know what they actually do for six months while “processing” the application.. I think I know the answer....

Irrelevant now, since it’s a once-in-a-lifetime thing, but it would be interesting to know nevertheless