You may remember my post from a few weeks ago about the city hall requesting my affidavit which we couldn’t provide. As of posting this was the solution for us:
Remote notary’s are NG
You can write your own document (what I did) that says you promise you have never been married (or currently aren’t married) in any country. My city hall gave me a document in Japanese that basically said the same thing and that getting the marriage affidavit is no longer available so this is the next best thing- so I just translated that into English. I then scheduled an appointment for the embassy’s notary. Simple as that. Cost 50 bucks. Took about 30 minutes.
I should add you should be careful about the verbiage you use. If it’s too casual or too vague they obviously won’t notarize it for you. They will also ask you to explain the document to the staff so it’s clear you know what you’re signing.
Even though I translated a Japanese document to English and got that notarized, the city hall wanted us to translate the English back to Japanese. They would not take the original Japanese document I got the English version from as a translation. Everything has to be translated INTO Japanese. And they will ask who translated.
Also for birth certificates they REALLY want the original. I had to do a lot of back and forth with them to accept my PDF scan. I imagine you get the wrong guy at the office that day the could decline it.
Lastly, it’s better to go to the city hall where the family registry is based if you need it done expeditiously. Even though the gentleman handling our situation at our city hall said all looked good it needed to be approved by the family registry city hall and THEN our city hall could recognize it. He also said the best place to get this all done is probably shinjuku as they might not need the notarized file, but he’s not certain.
Hope this helps
by Spaghetbby