In our blog post, Cases where change of residence status is not approved: Change from technical intern training, we mentioned that we have a client at our office in this particular case, and that we are waiting for the results of the application for permission to change residence status. The results have now come out, so we would like to share them with you.
In conclusion, unfortunately it was not permitted.
Background
First, on March 25th, I received the following notice of visit.
When applying for permission to extend period of stay or change status of residence, receiving a notice to visit the office means that permission has been denied. Usually, the reason is that the applicant is required to visit the office in order to fill out an application to change their status of residence to “designated activities” or “short-term visitor” on the spot in preparation for leaving the country.
On March 31st, I went to the Nagoya Immigration Bureau with the applicant.
The documents presented by the examiner are as follows:
Reasons for denial
As mentioned in the blog post referenced at the beginning, the permission requirements for this case, as stated in the examination guidelines, are as follows:
- The business content of the affiliated organization is related to the acceptance of technical intern trainees.
- The applicant must provide guidance to technical intern trainees from their home country regarding the skills they acquired while they were technical intern trainees.
- Must have Japanese language ability equivalent to N2 or higher
- Considering the number of technical intern trainees, there is a sufficient amount of work (for guidance) and the activity is not technical intern training itself.
- Achieving the current technical training goals
Regarding 3 above, we knew that the applicant in this case did not have a certificate because he had not taken the Japanese Language Proficiency Test. Therefore, we pinned our hopes on the keyword “equivalent to N2” and collected signatures from all employees, including technical intern trainees, agreeing that the applicant had excellent Japanese language ability and submitted them.
The examiner explained that the word “equivalent” was intended to refer to cases where a Japanese language test other than the JLPT is used, so proof based on some kind of test results was necessary.
Summary
This rule is based on the premise that the technical intern training program is based on the premise that trainees will return to their home country upon completion of their training.
This prerequisite has already been removed and will soon be replaced by “Training Employment,” so I thought maybe they would allow it, but unfortunately it was denied.
The applicant is currently undergoing review to apply for a Certificate of Eligibility, which means he will need to return to his home country and obtain a visa before entering the country.