Since the time of publication the handout has been expanded to cover all foreign residents of Japan, not just the Permanent Residents. The exact method of determining who is a resident has not been disclosed, bu I suspect it will be anyone with a foreigner’s registration card.
There’s been a lot of speculation about the recently-announced cash handout from the government regarding the applicability of it to foreign residents in Japan, but I’ve not seen anyone blogging about it in English, so here goes with what I have learnt.
According to the Mainichi Shimbun (Japanese edition) on the 7th of November 2008, permanent residents should get the handout too, all 440,000 or so of us, both the special Korean permanent residents and the everyday ones like me.
I predict they’ll be many foreigners moaning about why it doesn’t cover long-term non-permanent residents, or those on spouse visas, etc, but whatever the government decides people will find something to grumble about, of that I can be sure.
4 Comments
Tokyo Girl · April 2, 2009 at 22:01
April 1, 2009 (yesterday) we got our cash handout envelopes in the mailbox (Kita-ku, Tokyo). It turns out that we have to include photocopies of our ID s and our bank accounts along with the application (which also includes a place where we have written our bank account information), before mailing it.
They didn’t translate that part into English, so watch out !
Also if you are now living at a new address and have not registered at your local ward office, you may have that envelope sitting back at your old address. Go look!
It’s Y12,000 for each adult and Y20,000 for each child. Finally a (very) small bonus for those families trying to raise more than one or two kids!
Ken Y-N · April 2, 2009 at 23:51
Yup, I got mine too (Kawanishi-shi, Hyogo) a couple of days ago, one for me, one for my Japanese wife, with both of us marked as Head of Household! I don’t like the bit about sending a copy of your bank book myself either.
sam · April 16, 2009 at 19:37
is this payment on a monthly bases or only once ?
Ken Y-N · April 16, 2009 at 23:41
It’s a one-off, I’m afraid! Two months ago I saw the ex-livedoor boss, Horie, on the telly talking about it, and he was suggesting something in the order of 60,000 yen per month for a year!