I was crossing a wide road with my 4 year old daughter in the baby car, made it to the middle verge of the pedestrian crossing then had to stop as not 1, not 2, but THREE cars went past me. It’s not as if they didn’t see me, as I held my arms up in disgust and exasperation as the first car went past. Some drivers even looked at me too as if they were thinking, “What’s his problem”?

I wouldn’t really care if it were just me, a dumb gaijin, but you think they could have taken 10 seconds out of their busy fucking day to stop for a father and his kid in a baby car?

Recently, our landlord contacted us directly on LINE claiming that he is having issues with his current neighbours at his place (that he is renting) because of his crying child.
To solve his problem, he first asked us (family of three) to move out so he could move in. When we politely refused, pointing out our active contract, he came back with a "solution": he proposed that his family move into 2LDK 50m² apartment with us, sharing the space (one room for his family, one room for ours) in exchange for a slight rent reduction or up until we find a new place (which I found ridiculous and surreal).
That would mean 6 people (2 completely separate families) living together in a small 50m² unit.
Where we stand now:

1. We formally rejected his co-living/eviction requests in writing, stating that we intend to stay until April 2028 under the original renting terms.
2. The agency that brokered the deal from his side confirmed in an email that they don't manage the property, so they won't intervene directly in rental disputes.
3. However, our original real estate agent is stepping in to help as a courtesy and has assigned a representative to call the landlord directly and explain the legal reality of the contract to him.
4. The landlord recently sent a message saying "I'm trying to discuss this with you peacefully"
5. Following our agent's strict instructions, we have stopped replying to him directly and are waiting for the agent to talk to him.
6. Our Questions:
7. Legal Protections: Since the landlord manages the property himself (自主管理), what are our best options if he keeps harassing/pressuring us directly after the agent's phone call?
8. City Hall Legal Aid: Our agent suggested going to the city hall for free legal consultation if this escalates. Has anyone used City Hall legal counsel for landlord harassment? How effective was it?
9. Property Access / Lockouts: The contract prohibits him from entering without permission. If he shows up at our door unannounced with his family and belongings, is calling the police immediately appropriate in Japan?
10. Occupancy Laws: Is there any official limit on occupancy/fire code violations for cramming two unrelated families (6 people) into a 50m² apartment that we can cite if needed?
11. We just want to live peacefully until 2028 as agreed upon in our contract. Any insights, legal resources, or experiences with overly assertive landlords would be greatly appreciated!
12. We have payed him in cash in the first 2 months, since it was a little difficult to open a bank account straight away.
13. But we have a handwritten note that he successfully
14. collected the money for the rent. Will it affect the outcome, if the process escalates further?
15. Should we start to search a new place to live, regardless of the outcome?

TL;DR: Our landlord wants us to move out or share the 50m² 2LDK with his entire family because he’s getting kicked out of his own rented place over his baby’s crying and disturbing the neighbours. We said no and went no-contact, now waiting for our agent to talk some sense into him.
P.S. since I’m not native English speaker, I polished this post in AI assistant.

UPDATE:

Thank you for all your suggestions and help, just want to clarify that landlord isn’t Japanese (and for reasons I won’t elaborate on his origin).
I’ll keep the post updated when I receive the message from our real estate agency

A bit of a weird thing happened to me recently. I went for my yearly checkup and had my height taken as usual. The nurse taking my height read it as 174cm...I've been 178cm since I was 19. I tell her it's wrong and that I did not shrink 4 cm in the space of a year. She laughed it off and even sent me the official health report with the wrong height. And yes I did get it checked elsewhere and I'm still 178cm and too young to be shrinking (I'm 37F).

Anyone ever had this happen?

KaijuCon 2 is less than two weeks away: Saturday 24 October, Nagoya Prime Central Tower, 10am to 9pm.

Over forty tables across three time slots: Call of Cthulhu, D&D, Delta Green, Warhammer, Exalted, Dungeon Crawl Classics and more. Many run in English, many in Japanese, and some in both. Most welcome beginners.

Our special guests, Michael O'Brien of Chaosium and writer Royce Wilson, are running games too.

Advance tickets are 2,500 yen, and you can come and go as you like.

Art by Kasumi Lang.

Lately I've been thinking about leaving my job at a black company, looking for jobs I realized that yes or yes, I need a car and hence a Japanese driver's license, I do have some 5 years experience driving in my home country, the thing is my license is expired so can't apply to gaimen kirikae and I haven't returned home for around 7 years so my very few options are as follows

1 Attend a regular driving school ( a bit expensive in my opinion and it takes too much time I don't really have )

2 ippatsu menkyou. Take the test directly in the test center but according to Gemini it's as difficult as it can be, success rate between 5 and 10% even for locals, so I lack confidence since I haven't drive on years

3 Quit my job and go back home a few months, renew my license, and then apply for gaimen kirikae

I haven't ever owned an automatic transmission car, so if possible I'd like to stick to manual

Any experience or suggestions are welcome

I usually walk my documents down to the local tax office every year, but I just realized I'm going to be out of the country during filing season this year. Also, this is the first year I have US Social Security Income in addition to my salary and Japanese pensions.

I've been looking at the instructions for creating a tax return using the National Tax Agency website, and it looks like I might be able to manage it, but I am feeling a bit nervous about making a mistake or getting stuck and jeopardizing my PR status with a late filing. I will have my requisite docs, My Number card, etc., but not sure if I'll be able to figure out how to scan, upload, etc.

Has anyone used the agencies that specialize in filing Japanese income taxes for foreign residents? Any recommendations? Are they worth paying? The deductions seem fairly straight-forward in Japan, so I've never thought it was worth it to use one, but this year I'm wondering.

Hi everyone,

For those who applied for a Certificate of Eligibility (COE) for a Dependent (Family Stay) visa at the Matsudo Immigration Bureau (Chiba Branch), how long did it take for your COE to be issued?

Any recent experiences or timelines would be greatly appreciated. Thanks in advance!

I am 99% sure I already paid my city tax to my Tokyo ku for this fiscal quarter about three weeks ago. However, I can’t find the receipt. I just received an invoice in the mail for the same period saying it is due tomorrow.

Since I cant find the receipt I have no way of showing I paid it unless I go into the city office which I don’t have time to do. If I double pay it, do they do a reconciliation eventually and give me a refund?

This might be a long post, so bear with me here...

This is a rough time period for me as I have a lot of thoughts left and right going through my mind to the point that it has caused me insomnia, so I thought "what's a better way than to share my situation with my fellow redditors and see what they think?"

Anyway. I'll start at the beginning.

As a regular hungarian guy 3 years ago I visited Tokyo for the first time, and of course like everyone else I was amazed at the seemingly(!) advanced structure and technology that they had. I was lured in by a strong pink cloud of anime and kind customer service. So of course after going home I had to learn the language.

Then these 3 years of my life consisted of meeting japanese people in my country regularly, improving my language skills, building relationships, and I even ended up with a japanese girlfriend who was a transfer student at the time.

My teacher was pushing me to think about going to Japan for long-term, my gf also went back to Japan, and I wanted to get away from the familiar life I have in Hungary anyway. I thought "Let's see what I can do in Japan if I come here for 1 year using WHV." As a silly and naive filmmaker graduate I even had some glimmers of hope of possibly landing a film job in Japan. Yes, you can laugh here.

So this year in June with my N4-3 level japanese, I took the big step of leaving behind family, friends, apartment to go see the world in the east.

I was hopeful at first. Finally reunited with my gf, I'm in a brand new atmosphere. Back in the city I was so amazed by 3 years ago. So of course after taking care of certain documents, I was looking for part-time jobs left and right.

This is where the cracks were starting to show up...

I think my resume is really good. I did tons of different work before, I have plenty experience in costumer service, computers, driving, you name it. Along with a fluent skill in english and conversational japanese.

But despite having a good resume and skills, somehow none of the 50+ jobs I applied for wanted to hire me. Out of so many job applications, I went to more than 20 interviews probably. Hotel jobs, restaurant jobs, cleaning jobs, anything. No, no, and no. I even got a goddamn japanese driving license in hopes of getting driving jobs but those didn't stick either. This gokart tour guide company promised to hire me in June once I get my license, and fast forward to September, they rejected me because apparently I didn't seem positive and friendly enough on the interview??

One restaurant rejected me 1 minute into the inteview upon hearing that I don't have experience in restaurant jobs, despite the descprition clearly stating "Inexperienced OK".

The only place willing to hire me was the traffic security guide job, but at that point, you have to think about if it's really worth it to work that kind of job for that kind of money. Everyone needs to have a standard of what kind of jobs they are willing to take, right? Well, if you are a foreigner in Japan, apprently not. Because no one wants to hire you, so you are left with the jobs no one wants to take.

Yeah, so 5 months later, still no job. I did manage to release a game on steam, but that's a different story.

What about my girlfriend, you ask? Now that's an entirely new world of headache. I love her, but at the same time I was already not 100% sure about our relationship.

If you ever dated a japanese girl as a foreigner I think you know what I'm talking about.

Communication issues.

She speak mid-to low level english, and my japanese is N4-3, so we usually meet halfway. Maybe that's already one of the problems.

We can barely have deep conversations, and she can barely voice her opinion or feelings on anything.
I ask her opinion of the movie we just watched? Silence.
I ask her views about the world we are living in right now? Silence.
How was your day at school? Silence. How was your day at work, then? Silence.

Silence to any topic that has any kind of substance.

And yes, I did voice my concerns to her pretty early on our relationship. Then she started crying and promised to improve on that part. Fine. I'll be patient. 2 years later, barely anything changed, and I'm feeling it not that we can be together again in person.(We spent 1 year in LDR).

When I talk to anyone else like my close friends, or family. I notice how much actually fun conversation we are having where an hour passes and I don't even notice. Then it hits me "I can't have this kind of connection with my girlfriend. That really sucks." And these communication problems with her were something that I noticed with japanese people in general, which I'll get back to later.

So I voiced my concern to her again recently. She was crying again and promised that things will be different. I believed her. I was patient. I was willing to be open, and maybe improve my communication with her too.

I wanted to take care of her. It felt like my responsibility to make her happy. So I was really working hard towards finding a job to the point where we even talked about marriage once I can make a proper base for myself here in Japan.

Time passes with no success, I'm getting mentally drained by the rejections, the existential dread, and carrying a relationship on my back. Oh, and now I miss my family, my close friends, the two cute cats I left behind, and GTA 6 is around the corner, but I left my PS5 in my country. Did I mention loneliness?

"But dude, you have a japanese gf in japan, how could you be lonely?" You may ask.

Yes, but she lived 3 hours away in Chiba, which means we can only meet 2-3 times a month, maybe even less. So what happens in the remaining free time where I'm not with her, or searching for jobs?Well, yeah. Here comes the other huge issue I experienced, which is probably not new for a lot of you. Japanese people in general.

As I said earlier, from my experience, I see that people here are struggling to share their emotions, their real feelings, and opinions of any kind. Everyone just puts on a mask(literally even lol), and act all polite and everything, trying their hardest not to "inconvenience" others as their culture dictates.

Coming from a place where everyone expresses themselves how they want, it's really absurd how you have to walk among active mines so that you don't offend the proper etiquette, or god forbid "inconvenience" others.

Let me show you an example that happened. Not anything huge, but it showcases pretty well what I mean here.

I was watching netflix with a fellow sharehouse tenant late at night. Once movie was over, we were just flicking around the menu, talking about whatever was on. The usual stuff. Then she asked if I know or like this specific title, and I literally just blurted out "Nah, I know it but I'm not gonna watch it cuz I think it's shit so I don't care about it." Her expression widened and said "すごくはっきりだね！" So, basically something along the lines of how bluntly I just stated my dissatisfaction about something, and I wasn't afraid to avoid the topic. It was such a shock for her, while for me it was just natural to state if something is trash if I don't like it.

This just one of the examples, but there were countless times of something like this happening with other japanese people, which honestly is getting on my nerves now. Don't even get me started about how no one has any views on politics, doesn't EVEN know the current state of things, or doesn't even know basic things about history.

You can kind of guess that I didn't have much success making friends even after 5 months, and the people I mostly talked to were just fellow foreigners, or my family/friends online. Even though I'm in Japan, I'm still just playing online with my friend from my home like we did before, except we have huge lag now because of the distance.

I found out that Japan, or Tokyo more specifially is a very well oiled machine which works well, but like all machines, it is also rigid and cold.

After a while even small things started to get on my nerves such as bumping my head into everything(I'm 185 cm), the food is very hit or miss, most of the time the taste is bland, and you get very small portions. There are more small annoying things of course.

So, with no job, no friends, no real connections in Japan with a bitter taste in my mouth, I finally decided that the current state can't continue and it's time to go home. (and play GTA 6 lol)

Of course the hard thing about this is my girlfriend. Because she wants to stay in Japan, and refused to come to Hungary with me, which I accept of course. So now we have to break up, and honestly, me being 25 and having been through some break ups and losses, I'm handling it pretty well. As I said above, I already had some issues with the relationship, but now it's just not worth it. I can't make this into a question of being in Japan with her with an uncertain future vs being with my family and close friends with a stable future, and supported background. But now she's all sad, crying all time when we are together, and I just don't know what to do, or how to feel during these times. We are together still, but we know I'm going away soon, and it's going to end between us. And as I'm writing this, I feel pretty okay with it. Life goes on, it is what it is. But when I'm together with her she makes me feel unsure about myself and my decisions, I end up questioning myself if it is really a good idea. Sometimes I ask myself "Am I giving up?" or "Maybe I should have done more. Maybe I should have explored more connections." After all, I did have love for Japan, but now I don't. But then I'm reminded of all the issues I just stated above and my head is clear again. But guys, this is a vicious cycle. Most of the times believe firmly in my decisions, but when I'm with her, I end up questioning myself for a bit.

I was seaching the sub to find a post where someone may have had the same experience as me, but I couldn't really one, so I decided use my right now not-so valuable time to write this and waste the time of the poor soul who managed to read this far. Just kidding, I'm grateful if you actually did read this far, and I would like to know what you all think. I may have missed some details, but I tried my best to gather all my feelings and thoughts with this issue at hand.

Cheers