Today I move out of my apartment in Ebisu and I will move in into my new apartment in Kinshicho on May 1st.
In the meantime, from tomorrow to May 1st, I will live at a friend’s house in Shinjuku. Since I will live there longer than 14 days and since I am a long-term resident in Tokyo (not a tourist), I have to declare this change to the city hall. However, my friend’s contract stipulates that only 1 person can officially live in her apartment.
We wonder that if I declare my friend’s address as my official address (that will be printed on my residence card), there would be any control about this: will someone at the city hall contact the owner of the apartment, the rental agency, the janitor,… to verify my stay at my friend’s apartment? If so, my friend risks to have troubles since she is only allowed to live alone in her apartment.
In that case, I was wondering whether I can rent “an address” somewhere. Is there any possibility of renting a mail box in Tokyo, that I can use during my stay at my friend’s house?
If someone would be able to inform me about this… That would be lovely!
Thx
There’s definitely some mail box services in Tokyo, but can’t remember any off the top of my head.
One idea, perhaps you could do mail forwarding from your old address (the post office does this for free, just ask for the form at a post office), to your friends apartment and only change your resident registration when you move in to your new apartment.
However, there might be a problem. This month, someone new will register at my old address. Will they notice at the city hall that I would also still be registered in that place?
They definitely do a a bit more tracking of you with all this My Number nonsense, but the city office isn’t the secret police! They’ve got better things to do (lots of paper to shuffle) than check to see if everyone is living where they say they are. You can travel the world for 6 months without informing the city office, so two weeks living somewhere temporarily isn’t a big deal. I haven’t done it for a while, but I remember the last time I changed my address, the hard part was proving that I lived there. If I recall, I needed a piece of mail with my name and new address on it. Not sure if you need this now.