It looks like we’ll be heading off to Japan a little sooner than we thought.  We’ve been asked to arrive on about Feb. 25, two or three weeks earlier than we’d expected.   Shouldn’t be a problem as long as there aren’t any delays getting our working visas.

In order to get the visas we were required to send a number of documents including notarized copies of our university diplomas to our employer in Japan.  They have presented them to Japanese Immigration on our behalf and are waiting for Certificates of Eligibility to be issued.  This usually takes about four or five weeks.  Once the certificates are issued, they’ll be sent to us and we’ll take them, along with our passports, to the closest Japanese consulate which is located in Calgary.  The consulate will hold our passports for five working days then stamp the working visas directly into them.  We can either return to the consulate to pick them up or arrange to have them mailed back to us.

I’m not usually a fan of Canada Post but I must say that I was impressed when we sent the required documents to Japan at the end of Nov.   I mailed them on a Thurs. morning and by Sunday evening we’d received an email letting us know that they’d arrived!  We sent them priority post and paid accordingly, of course, but I was still pleasantly surprised by how quickly they got there.