All Paperwork is Done

All required paperwork before and in order to go to Japan is done now!

I picked up my shiny new US passport this morning. This completes the ordeal through the Japanese, German, and American bureaucracy.

A little explanation: I had to surrender my Greencard after my citizenship oath and was handed the naturalization certificate. One cannot travel with the certificate. Instead, one has to apply for a passport with it. This is the reason why I could not leave yet for Japan. All is good now and I am off to Japan next Friday.

Temporary Housing on Okinawa

I received the address of my temporary housing last night. It is an apartment in, what looks from Google Street View, a 10 story building with approx. 60 rental units. The buildings across the street are all fairly low so that I should have a good view of the ocean no matter which floor I will be on.

This place is about 10 minutes by car away from OIST and located directly at the shuttle bus route to/from OIST. It should be a nice walk if the humidity is not too high or if it’s not raining. There is only one bus in the morning to OIST and one bus in the afternoon leaving OIST.

Apparently, this is the heart of the Fuchaku resort area of Onna-son (=Onna village).

Here are some restaurants that are close by: Uraniwa, Steak house Jam, Onna soba, Chinuman.
BTW: Google Translate is awesome for these kinds of explorations.

The plan is that I will stay in this temporary apartment until close to when Denise and the cats will move to Okinawa in mid-May. I will then look for a permanent house/apartment for all of us. When Denise arrives, she can move into the permanent place right away. We will still have to wait for our furniture etc. to arrive on a container ship from the US which may take another ~6 weeks by that time. This is easier than trying to find a furnished rental apartment that allows cats.

Passports

I finally picked up my German passport this morning. Even finding parking on Jackson St in San Francisco was easy.

Navigating from the German Consulate to the US Passport Agency on Hawthorne in S.F. was not so easy. I printed out direction and still somehow managed to not get it right. I made it to my appointment, though, with 20 minutes to spare (I gave myself one hour 😉 ). Up to the 5th floor, through security, drawing a number, waiting, and being processed took under 10 minutes! If I wanted to, I could have picked up the passport already tomorrow (do they print them there in the basement??) but I told them that that is not necessary. My first US passport will be ready to be picked up by Wednesday after 11am 🙂

Duties as US Citizen

I went to the Social Security Field Office in Mountain View this morning to get my status changed to “US citizen.” It took only 45 minutes – not bad. The thing I don’t understand, though, is why I will get a new social security card even though my SSN did not change.

The other thing I did this morning was to make an appointment with the US Passport Agency in San Francisco to get my expedited US passport within the next two weeks. They even offered appointments for this morning which I couldn’t take. My appointment is now Monday morning at 11am. That will give me some time on Monday before 11am to go to the German Consulate to finally pick up my new German passport. There is no need to go to San Francisco twice, today and Monday, for the two passports.

BTW: I promise this blog will get less dry once I am actually over in Japan. I will also post a lot of pictures 😉

US Citizenship and Passpot

I am a US citizen since yesterday!

I put my voter registration in the mail this morning and will apply for a US passport as soon as possible (more below).

The decision to become citizen was a purely based on business considerations. I have a Greencard for over 5 years now and about to leave the US for more than 6 months. 6 months is a magic limit for Greencard holder. Being outside the US for longer requires a special permit or I would lose the Greencard. I believe there is a max. limit for that as well. I heard rumors about some trick(?) to leave the US with a Greencard for longer than 6 months without losing it but I have yet to confirm that. Anyway, it seemed easier for me to just apply for citizenship to have the option of coming back and working in the US after returning from Japan in a few years.

Applying for citizenship is surprisingly easy. Fill out the form N-400 and pay the fee. Once in the system, I was asked to have my fingerprints taken. After that I had to go to the interview with the reading, writing, and civics tests. Then came the oath ceremony yesterday where I had to take the “Oath of Allegiance”. There were 1002 applicants from 99 countries in the Paramount theater in Oakland yesterday. The ceremony took about 45 minutes after which they handed out the citizenship certificates. They have quite an efficient system for handing out this many certs.

Since my trip to Japan will be (essentially) two weeks from now, I can take the super expedited version of the US passport application. I need to call the Passport Agency of the State Department to make an appointment and pay the extra fee for it. That will get me a US passport less than 2 weeks for my trip.

German Passport Renewal

Now that I have the Japanese visa in my German passport, I noticed that it will expire in January 2012. One year from now!
So I looked on the website of the German Federal Foreign Affairs Ministry for the nearest consulate from Okinawa and that turned out to be on the Japanese main island. Germany now requires to show up in person to apply for a passport because of the digital fingerprint on the chip in the passport. I would have to fly from Okinawa to mainland Japan to renew my passport – not good.
Normally, German passports can be renewed (this is a misnomer. You can’t re-new an existing passport. You have to get a new one and have your old one invalidated) only 6 months before they expire. I sent the German consulate in San Francisco a message through their website asking whether there are exceptions. Turns out, there are and I fall under one of them (they answered my question within one business day!). I filled out the passport application form and gathered all necessary supporting documents. Among others, a marriage certificate because my status had changed 🙂 After that I called the appointment phone number (1.50 Euro/minute! to be paid by credit card – why do I pay German taxes??) to get an appointment in San Francisco for early the next day. After taking the prints of my two index fingers and paying some extra fees for expedited delivery, I was done in 10 minutes. They told me the passport would be ready for pickup within two weeks. It took them two days longer and I will pick up the new passport on Friday. From now on, I will have to travel again with two German passports: one valid one and one expired one that has my Japanese visa in it. I had to do that before with my American H1-B visa.

Japanese Work Visa

Obtaining my Japanese work visa was a multi-step process:

The first step is the employer, OIST in my case, applying for a “Certificate of Eligibillity” (CoE) in Japan. For this I needed to fill out a form with some personal information like birthday. The category in my case is “Activities for research”.

For my wife, Denise, the same needed to be done (category “spouse”) so we needed to submit a copy of our wedding certificate. OIST then sent both CoEs to me. It turned out that these are only valid for three months which meant that Denise’s CoE was not usable since she will move only in mid-May. I took my CoE together with my German passport, two passport photos and a filled out a visa application form to the Japanese Consulate in San Francisco. They checked everything and corrected the mistakes I made filling out the application form.
I found the language on the form very confusing but they were very helpful at the consulate. This took about 30 minutes. I had to come back a few days later to pick up my German passport with my Japanese one-time-only entrance visa in it. The CoE is stapled to that page and the immigration officer at the airport will rip that out. The one-time-only entrance visa is valid for three months. I better make it over there in time 😉 Whenever I need to leave Japan, I need to obtain a re-entry permit on Okinawa. The consulate gave me a list of addresses where I can do this. The only place where I cannot get this is the airport – I wonder why. Meanwhile, OIST will have to get another CoE for my wife but there is still time enough. My CoE states that I will be employed by OIST. Denise’s said (and the new one will say) that she is a “trailing spouse” and, as such, not allowed to work. If she wants to work in Japan, her potential employer needs to apply for a new CoE for her.

Here is the resulting visa entry in my passport

How I found the job at OIST

Jonathan Dorfan, a former director of the SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory, announced on July 9, 2010 that he will be joining OIST as their new president. See the and his personal message.
I didn’t know anything about OIST so I looked it up and browsed around on their web site. There I found their careers web pages with a job opening for “HPC Facility Manager.”
I told my wife jokingly that I should apply to get a free trip to Japan out of it – I had never been to Japan. I did not seriously consider this position and forgot about the position. Later, in mid-August I somehow remembered the job posting and applied, still not seriously wanting to move. I received a request for an interview on September 7, 2010. No other contact via phone or email had happened before this request. The interview was scheduled for September 30th and October 1st. After one more phone call an offer letter arrived on November 4th. At that point my wife and I started seriously thinking about and discussing the possibility. The information during the interview at OIST was what swayed me. I was pleasantly surprised how quickly my wife embraced the idea of moving to Okinawa – she has never lived outside of California (except as exchange student for a few month.)

I am moving to Okinawa!

In three weeks I will finally be sitting in an airplane with a one-way ticket to Okinawa, Japan.
I have applied for this new job on August 27. Two weeks later I was invited for a two day interview on Sep 30th and Oct 1st and got a job offer two more weeks later.
My new position is at the Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology on the island of Okinawa in the very south of Japan. OIST, as it is called, is the first western style university in Japan. It is a graduate university, i.e. there will be no undergraduate education. And it is international, meaning that there will be at least 50% non-Japanese faculty and students. For Japan, these are three facts against us: new, international, and on Okinawa. We will see how academia and funding agencies will treat us.
Technically, OIST is not a university yet. It is still working on its accreditation with the Japanese federal education ministry. If you think about it, it is actually quite tricky to bootstrap a brand-new university.  OIST was the brain-child of Nobel Prize winner Sydney Brenner. Sydney convinced the federal Japanese education ministry to fund a new building in which a number of Principal Investigators (PIs) will do research with their groups. Once OIST has its accreditation, these PIs will undergo a review process which will then make them into faculty. Everybody else employed by OIST has also go through this review process. Accreditation and reviews are going to happen in 2011. The first grad students will then arrive in 2012.
My position will be that of High-Performance Computing (HPC) Facility Manager.In this new role, I will be responsible for architecting, designing, purchasing, installing, and operating the research and scientific computing, storage and networking facilities for all research groups at the university.

This blog will report my route to Okinawa and how I will adjust and figure out how to live and work there.