Request for additional documents
After submitting your visa application, you sometimes receive a letter from the immigration, requesting you to submit additional documents.
At the immigration office counter
Immigration officers check your documents when you visit there to submit your application.
When they notice some documents are missing, they:
+ might ask you to get them and come back (when the documents are very important ones and they cannot receive your application documents)
+ might give you a letter requesting you to submit them soon, usually within 1 week.
A letter comes after a while
追加資料通知書 Tsuikashiryo Tsuchisho
The immigration sometimes decide to request for additional documents while examining your documents. The immigration might have failed to notice missing documents upon submission. Or, they might have decided to get more information from you because the submitted documents are not enough for them to make decisions. Or, they might have found something suspicious in your documents. In any case, they request for additional documents because they cannot make decisions based on the documents available to them.
The immigration's letter tells you 1) what documents they need and 2) by when they need them. The officer sometimes adds notes how they want the documents, such as "explanation letter prepared by the employer", "explanation with supporting documents" , etc.
The immigration's letter is written in Japanese. Fully and accurately understand what it says. Using machine translations? We don't recommend. If you don't understand the letter, contact us.
Respond to the immigration!
Make sure you respond to the immigration's request for additional documents. Ignoring their request is the worst and you surely don't want to do that. They have asked you to submit them because they cannot make decisions without them. They will stop the process until they receive the missing documents.
Make sure you submit the right documents. If you submit wrong ones (that is, something different from what the immigration want to look at), they might request again if time allows or might deny your application.
Make sure you submit them before the due date. For visa extension and visa change applications, the immigration officer in charge sets the due date considering your current visa expiry date because they need to give you the result within 2 months after your current visa expiry date at the latest.
What if I don't submit them by due date?
They usually don't call you in order to gather missing information. They will make their decision based on the documents submitted by you. If you don't submit requested documents, they will likely deny your application.
What if I cannot make the due date?
Contact the immigration right away and ask if they could postpone. If you have enough time left before your visa expiry date, such as in case of Permanent Residency application or Certificate of Eligibility application, the immigration would set a new due date for you.
But in case of visa extension application, it is often hard to postpone. So, it is very important to submit all the necessary documents in the beginning.
What if I cannot prepare the requested documents?
Prepare a letter to explain why you cannot submit them. If you have justifiable reasons, the immigration might understand your situations.
Try to think of alternative documents you could submit, which might meet the immigration's need.
Again, submitting nothing is what you definetely want to avoid.
Contact us
We BEYOND offer support for preparing additional documents
After hearing from you, we could offer our support in many cases. It is very helpful that you have all the copies of what you have submitted to the immigration because discrepancies in your documents would result in application denial in some cases.
Please contact us for an appointment.