Japanese Bureaucracy

Japan is infamous for a dense and arbitrary bureaucratic culture, and from my limited experience so far, I can report an unusual attention paid to paperwork, and a fondness for seeing it multiply.  Virtually everyone who's touched my passport here, which is pretty much everyone who's stood on the other side of a counter from me (except the cafeteria ladies), has made at least one photocopy of it: two at the airport, one at the university, two at city hall (I had to register as a resident foreigner -- they like to keep tabs on us here), one at the bank, one at the hotel.  It would have been three at the apartment company, had Y-----san, my sponsor, not grown impatient and refused on my behalf.

True fact: it is unlawful in Japan to photocopy a passport.

And when it actually comes to the cherished activity of filling out forms, official persons always get a pained or anxious look on their faces when Y-----san explains that I can neither read nor write Japanese and perhaps it would be easier for everyone if I could just use romaji?  Easier, of course, is not really the idea, so usually there can be no romaji.  It is also not to be permitted that I allow Y-----san to fill out the forms on my behalf.  I must do it myself while official person watches.  So I've now several times been through the exercise of standing there while Y-san writes down the Japanese characters for me, and I copy them into the blanks on the forms.  And yet!  While it won't do to have Y-san write in information like my address, etc., the bank official today was perfectly happy to take my signature stamp away from me, go to another room, and use it to sign my name 5 or 6 times out of my sight, on legally binding agreements that she knew I could not read.

But at least there was no cheating on the address part.