Saitamaculture & etiquette

The Saitama Branch Office of the Tokyo Regional Immigration Services Bureau, in Chūō ward, used to cover seven prefectures — Saitama, Chiba, Ibaraki, Tochigi, Gunma, Yamanashi and Nagano — which made it one of the more congested counters in the country and pushed a lot of Saitama residents to the main bureau at Shinagawa instead. From 1 April 2023 its area is Saitama Prefecture alone. If you are reading an older guide that tells you to allow a day in Tokyo for a status extension, it is out of date. Note that it is a branch office, not a regional bureau: routine applications are handled here, and the Tokyo bureau remains the parent for anything unusual.

Japanese law requires you to register your address at the ward office covering it within fourteen days of moving in. Saitama's wards are Nishi, Kita, Ōmiya, Minuma, Chūō, Sakura, Urawa, Minami, Midori and Iwatsuki. They are grouped by which city they used to be: the Ōmiya side, the Urawa side, Yono in the middle as Chūō ward, and Iwatsuki out to the east. Registration produces the jūminhyō and triggers your My Number, and without it you cannot enrol in health insurance, open most bank accounts or complete a phone contract.

Saitama City was created on 1 May 2001 by merging Urawa, Ōmiya and Yono, became an ordinance-designated city on 1 April 2003, and absorbed Iwatsuki on 1 April 2005 as its tenth ward. Twenty-five years on the merger has not produced a single centre. Ōmiya is the transport hub and the commercial and nightlife district; Urawa is where the prefectural government, the courts and the schools with reputations are; Saitama-Shintoshin between them is the arena, the shopping and the relocated national government offices. They are three stops apart and they behave like different towns. Choosing on rent alone, without deciding which of the three your daily life is in, is the commonest mistake here.

Deposit, key money, agency fee, guarantor company fee, fire insurance and the first month. Key money is a gift to the landlord you never see again. Saitama runs on the Tokyo format — refundable shikikin plus non-refundable reikin — and the underlying rents are perhaps a quarter to a third below the equivalent inside Tokyo's 23 wards, so the absolute number is lower but the multiplier is the same. Have it liquid in a Japanese account before you start looking.

Ōmiya carries six Shinkansen services — Tōhoku, Hokkaidō, Yamagata, Akita, Jōetsu and Hokuriku — plus JR conventional lines, the Tōbu Urban Park Line and the New Shuttle, and handles several hundred thousand passengers a day. Tokyo Station is around twenty-five to thirty minutes on the Ueno-Tokyo Line and about twenty by Shinkansen. That connectivity, not local employment, is what the city sells. Ōmiya ward itself pulls in more daytime workers than it sends out, but Saitama as a whole is the classic commuter prefecture.

The flat per-capita portion of residence tax from FY2024 is ¥3,000 to Saitama City plus ¥1,000 to Saitama Prefecture plus ¥1,000 for the national Forest Environment Tax — ¥5,000 a year. Saitama Prefecture is one of the minority that levies no additional forest or environment surcharge on top of the standard ¥1,000, where Hiroshima adds ¥500 and Miyagi adds ¥1,200. It is small money, but it is the sort of line that appears on a first bill with no explanation, and knowing your prefecture does not have one saves you looking for it.