Register at city office

I've been in Japan for one week now and I'm starting to feel at home once again. It takes some time for me to adjust to a new apartment, and when I first sat foot into this one I hated it to be honest. However I've done my best to make this my home and I think it's all right now. One thing that has been bugging me for this one week though was to visit the city office to register, and that is what I'll dedicate this entry to.

When you arrive in Japan on a visa you have to register in the city you'll be living within 14 days after you arrived. To go through this procedure you first have to know in which city you'll be living in, then find the office obviously. There are no ways around this, and unfortunately most offices don't offer any English help, so if you're not speaking Japanese you just have to do the best out of the situation.
In my case I live in Itabashi, so to find my ward office, I just simply googled Itabashi ward office and google handled me a map and their opening hours. By doing this I also came across a document in English, explaining the procedure. However, it also explained that the staff only speaks Japanese and that you are recomended to bring a Japanese speaker with you. Despite having studied Japanese I felt very nervous about this since I got help from native speakers last time I had to go through this, and there's paperwork and questions asked and I hate not being able to understand (I seriously woke up in the middle of the night last week thinking about this XD). Like I said though, there's no shortcut and I hate being of trouble to others so I decided not to ask for help but to go there myself, and so I did this morning.
I arrived at 9.30 am and was done by 11.40, my advice: plan this well, it will take time.

So the first thing you ahve to do is to find the register, at Itabashi it was at the Family register department so I went there and found only documents entirely in Japanese and I had a bit of a hard time to understand some of them, so fortunately a lady working there approached me asking if I needed help so I told her in Japanese that I was living in Itabashi since last week and that I'm a student, and she handed me an English version of the document aswell as an example showing how you should fill it out. After that I received a number and when I was called upon a nice older women took my document, copied my passport and Japanese ID which I received at the immigration office when arriving at Narita. There's not much to do at this point, she gave me some information about the town (like when you can throw garbage etc) and then asked if I already had the health insurance. The health insurance is sort of a have to have. Last time I was in Japan this was the biggest issue in my registration process, because I refused getting it since I was fully insured by my university. The staff however claimed that if I were to be hospitalized and would hand the doctor my insurance, in English, they'd not be able to understand and it would not be valid (or I would at least probably have to cash up to begin with). I don't want to make a fuss and the insurance is really cheap if you're a student, so I entered and did so this time too obviously. The insurance covers 70% of medical care, so you only have to pay 30% and I'm guessing those 30% will be paid by the insurance I have from my own country if I would have to visit a doctor. I think last time the price ended up on 5000yen for half a year, and this time I think it was even less, no idea if that depends on the city you're living in or not. Anyway, the nice lady told me to go to the window for health insurance, after they had printed my address on the back of my Japanese ID. So I went to that line and there I had to fill out some more papers (in Japanese only), stating my current address, name, birthday, sex etc. They then printed a card for me and informed that the bill would come by post in February and that I could pay at most convenience stores like last time.

This is no fun event, and I can't imagen having to do this without knowing any Japanese. Sometimes they will call out the numbers without any screen showing it, if you don't understand any Japanese that will make it impossible to know when it's your turn. If so, I'd recomend that you look and see if anyone else is approaching and if not walk up and show your number tag. By the end of this entry I have written down keywords that might be of some help if anyone having to do this finds his or her way to this blog. I can also recomend to bring a dictionary of some sort, I have one on my phone and at one point when I didn't understand a word the woman who helped me was asking I could easily check it up. I tried looking for a walkthrough before arriving in Japan but not much information was given, hopefully this will be of help for someone. If wondering anything else leave a comment and I'll try and reply as fast as possible!

Keywords
留学 Ryuugaku - Study abroad
登録  Touroku - Registration
市役所 Shiyakusho - City hall
保険 Hoken - Insurance