How to continue to stay in Japan even after you divorce your Japanese spouse?

When you are urged to make a big decision to divorce your Japanese wife or husband, things you concern from the position of a foreigner are living, child rearing, work, and other things directly related to your life.

If you have lived in Japan for long years, your living base is definitely established in Japan and think about visa renewal and how you can stay longer in Japan. You may be worried about your child, too. In this article, I want to talk about how you can realize to stay longer in Japan even after you got a divorce as visa status “Long term Resident”

First thing first, understand your current situation

Please check if your current situation corresponds the following conditions.

Do you have a child between you and your Japanese wife or husband?

If you have a child between you and your Japanese spouse, you can renew your visa status as “Long Term Resident” even after you got a divorce. However, only the fact you have a child between you and your spouse doesn’t let you renew your visa status. After divorce, you need to get the parental authority and earn sufficient income to look after your child.

When you apply for your visa renewal, you can include child support receiving from your ex-husband as one of your income but if only your income by your work is enough to bring up your child, immigration Officer’s impression would rather be better and you will have high possibility to pass the screening.

However, these factors are really sensitive and not firmly regulated as a legal rule. For that reason, whether you can renew your visa status with this condition all depends on the discretion of the immigration officer.

You need to explain the background that you got a divorce and you got the parental authority and how you look after your child during the interview.

You have been married to your Japanese wife of husband for over 3 years

If you have been married to your Japanese spouse for more than 3 years, you are recognized that you stay longer in Japan and you have the possibility to change your visa status to “Long term resident”.

However, the procedure to change your visa status to “Long term resident” after divorce is not firmly regulated by a legal rule. The condition that you shall have been married to your Japnese spouse for 3 years is an implicit practical rule which is decided as one of the criteria of the screening of visa renewal.

For that reason, you are obliged to explain the details of the background of your divorce about what made you decide to separate from your spouse and how you can make a living in Japan after divorce to the regional immigration office.

You graduated from a university

If you can find a job related to the field which you majored in when you went to the university or college, you have the possibility to change your visa status, “Engineer / Specialist in Humanities / International Services” to after the divorce.

Graduation from not only universities or colleges in Japan but also the ones in other countries can be accepted as one of the conditions to satisfy the visa status, “Engineer / Specialist in Humanities / International Services”.

Prior to changing to visa status, “Engineer / Specialist in Humanities / International Services”, your employees need to be decided at the time of your visa renewal application.

A job that allows you to acquire the visa status, “Engineer / Specialist in Humanities / International Services” is limited to a highly specialized field which you can make the most of what you majored in your university. So, you are not allowed to get a job of manual labor such as a waiter, convenience store staff, factory worker, etc…

If you do such a job under a spouse visa before you formally get a divorce, you need to change a highly specialized job to be grated the visa status of “Engineer / Specialist in Humanities / International Services”.

You never correspond to any questions above

If you never corresponded to any questions above, only the visa status you can renew is “Business Manager”. The conditions to be granted the visa status “Business Manager” is preparing more than 5 million yen and securing employees. If you can’t satisfy the condition of visa status, “Business Manager”, there is no visa status you can get after the divorce. In that case, you should have the divorce waited by your Japanese spouse.

The reason you divorce your Japanese spouse

There is surely the reason that you decide to divorce your Japanese spouse. If you want to stay longer in Japan for some reasons by renewing your visa status even after the divorce, you should explain your situation to the immigration officer.

I sympathize that it is a mentally hard time to explain your unfortunate background of divorce that you don’t want anyone to touch as much as possible such as financial problem, incompatibility each other, and other undesired inevitable factors that made you and your Japanese spouse separate

Even explaining this to an immigration officer, you may think you want to explain your circumstance by face-to-face communication to the officer who sympathizes your circumstance. However, the number of screening related to visa permission after a divorce a day is a tremendous amount. So you need to explain it on a document as detailedly as possible. I introduce what kind of document you need to create and what kind of content you need to write it on

The date you got married to and divorced your Japanese spouse

You write when you got married to your Japanese spouse. If you came to Japan on the occasion of marriage, you should write when you came to Japan after you got married to your Japanese spouse. Finally, you write when you divorced your Japanese spouse.

The events you had experienced until you decided to divorce your Japanese spouse and your feeling then.

You write the various life events you had experienced so far until you decided to divorce your Japanese spouse. For example, your Japanese spouse didn’t get a job and just stayed home all day long. your Japanese wife had an affair with another guy. You just write the event that finally made you decide to separate.

The situation when you decided to divorce your Japanese spouse

Write the situation when you decided to divorce your Japanese spouse and your Japanese spouse agreed to the divorce. What you’re going to write here is more or less talking about the same thing above but you write why you decided to divorce your Japanese spouse. For example, because you haven’t been able to forgive the fact that your Japanese husband had never got a job after all and had an affair with another woman without knowing it.

The reasons that you need to continues to live in Japan even after the divorce

Write the reason you want to continue to live in Japan. For example, you need to bring up your child speaking only Japanese because you already got the parental authority, or you have lived in Japan for 10 years and your life is almost based in Japan. You may not be able to establish your life base in your mother country from scratch from even now.

How you can make a living in Japan after the divorce

In this part, you write your financial situation related to your job to continue to live in Japan after the divorce. For example, you explain what company you work for, how much income you earn monthly on a regular basis if you have sufficient fund enough to continue to live in Japan even after the divorce.

Things to be noted before writing the facts

The mentioned above is the rough flow of how you write “statement of divorce“. If possible, you’d better summarize briefly the above contents in 2 sheets of A4 sized paper. You should write easy and frank expression as an officer can understand at one sight. If you can’t write Japanese, you should ask your Japanese spouse to help writing it.

The most important thing you should pay attention to is to write everything based on the truth and never write a lie on the statement of divorce.

Trying to bring out officer’s good impression, you may feel like bending the truth and explaining it exaggeratedly. I know how you feel but it is too risky when your wrong story different from the truth comes to light. When you tell the first lie, you tell a second lie to cover the story. To cover the second lie, you cannot help telling the third lie. While you keep telling a lie, you forgot the first lie story after all and collapse of your lying story will begin.

If your wrong story comes to light, your visa screening is way more difficult which probably tells you to have no choice but to go back to your country.

The visa acquisition after the divorce is one of the most difficult procedures after you are refused to pass the screening. In the first place, this visa is given to the fact that you are married to a Japanese partner to suit the convenience that you can spend a marriage life with your Japanese spouse. If you personally have enough ability and academic background to contribute to Japanese society, you have a lot of chances to renew your visa status. However, if you came to Japan to just spend marriage life with your Japanese spouse, there is no reason for the immigration bureau to accept your offer of continuous stay in Japan even after the divorce.

What happens if your visa renewal offer is unaccepted

If you fail to pass the screening, you lose your resident status in Japan and are granted a postponement of 30 days until you leave Japan.

This 30-day postponement is really complicated. Even if you newly reapply for visa status of “long-term visa”, at the time the postponement period is passed, you are recognized as an overstayer. If you are going to reapply for a long-term stay visa when you present visa status allows you to stay in Japan for at least 31 days, additional postponement of two months at the longest for the visa screening can be granted newly

If you want to renew your visa status, it will take from 2 weeks to one month until you get to know the result of the screening. It is quite difficult to reapply for a long-term visa within the postponement of 30 days as a departure preparation period. You need to finish the document as perfect as possible enough to take one chance.

If you are worried about visa renewal after you divorced your Japanese spouse, you should ask
Administrative Scrivener to support your visa renewal. It is not impossible for you to go through the procedure by yourself but the time is limited and you have no time to fail but you only have one chance of visa application.

Necessary documents and certificates you need to prepare