TakumiPen is a software application that simplifies and automates the work of filling in residence forms: it asks you basic contextual questions and places your answers onto the forms the Agency publishes, so you complete your own documents with far less of the typing and far less confusion. Further, it offers direct access to a community of licensed professionals whose membership is completely voluntary — they sign themselves up to reach the applicant community. This software does not advise, file, or represent anyone, and it gives no professional preference over another in how they are listed or reached.
What this application does, what it does not do, who actually decides the outcome of your case, and what happens to the information you enter.
This application helps you prepare paperwork used in Japanese marriage, visa and immigration procedures — principally the status of residence 「日本人の配偶者等 (spouse or child of a japanese national)」 (Spouse or Child of Japanese National).
It asks plain questions once, writes your answers onto the Immigration Services Agency's own published forms, shows them back to you in red so you can check every value in position before anything is filed, and produces a print-ready bundle with a summary of everything you said. It also lists the supporting documents you must obtain yourself, explains the terms involved, and cites the government sources behind each statement it makes.
It is a document preparation aid. That is the whole of what it is.
This application does not grant, approve, guarantee or influence any immigration outcome. It cannot, and nothing in it should be read as suggesting otherwise.
Every decision on a visa, a status of residence, permission to land, or entry into Japan rests entirely and exclusively with the Japanese authorities — the Immigration Services Agency and the Ministry of Justice, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and its embassies and consulates, and the municipal offices that handle civil registration. Those authorities apply their own criteria, exercise their own discretion, and may request further documents, conduct interviews, or refuse an application for reasons they are not obliged to explain in advance.
Specifically, and without limitation:
It does not give legal advice. It explains what forms ask for and what documents are, citing official sources. It does not advise on your particular case, and reading it does not create any professional relationship.
It does not file anything on your behalf. Filing as an agent is a regulated role in Japan, held by an accredited 行政書士 (administrative scrivener) or lawyer who has notified the immigration bureau. Software is not an agent. Every document produced here is handed to you to check, sign and submit yourself.
It does not fill fields the forms require in your own hand. Four fields are marked 自筆 (written in one's own hand) and are deliberately left blank.
It does not judge your case. Where the record includes a previous refusal, a period of overstay, a criminal or traffic penalty, or an income the tax certificate will not support, the right course is a prepared bundle and advice from a qualified professional — not a confident answer from software.
Every factual claim about procedure carries a citation to a government page that was fetched and confirmed, with the date it was verified. Sources deliberately excluded are recorded together with the reason, because a plausible-looking URL can point at the wrong procedure entirely.
Even so, this material can go out of date between one visit and the next. Two fee changes inside eighteen months are already recorded here, and most secondary guidance still states the superseded figures. Check anything that matters against the official source before you rely on it — every page here links to the source it used.
If you find something wrong, it is a defect worth reporting rather than a difference of opinion.
A spouse-visa bundle is not assembled in one sitting. Certificates have to be requested, a family register has to catch up with a marriage, and a couple often needs several weeks to gather what is asked for.
You can attach a case to an account. Sign in and the application you started follows you to any device — your own laptop, a phone at the ward office, whatever is to hand — and it is reachable only by you. Each time you sign in, we email a single-use link that expires in fifteen minutes and works only in the browser that asked for it. A password can also be set on an account; that path is built but not yet switched on, and the emailed link remains the way back in if a password is lost.
An account is now required to start a case. This was not always so, and the reason for the change is worth stating. A case that reopened by its own address made that address the only thing protecting it, and anyone who obtained it — from a shared screen, a browser history on a family computer, a forwarded message — could open passport numbers, an income and a written account of a marriage. Requiring an account before a case exists means there is never a moment when your answers sit on disk with nobody attached to them, and the address alone is never enough to open them. Reference pages — the guide, the glossary, the timeline, the checklist — ask for nothing and remain open to everyone.
What is held is encrypted, and yours to take or destroy. Your answers are encrypted on the disk of the machine running the application, with a key kept outside every directory that gets backed up. From your account page you can export a case as a single file, or delete it — immediately, not scheduled for later, and not recoverable afterwards.
Some things do not change. Documents are still produced for you to check, sign and submit yourself. Your answers are never used to train anything, whatever you consent to. The two optional consents — notice when the rules change, and anonymised usage figures — are separate, off unless you turn them on, and refusing them changes nothing about what you receive. And no account, of any kind, changes who decides the outcome.
What is stored, how it is protected, what Japanese and European data-protection law requires, and what the Terms say, is written up in the project's technical documentation.
Your answers, the documents produced from them, and the record of changes are written to the machine running this application, encrypted, and are not transmitted anywhere by this software. Where TakumiPen is used as a hosted service, that machine is a server in Boston, Massachusetts, in the United States, and the Privacy Policy sets out what follows from that. An account is required to start a case. Nothing is shared with any authority by this software — filing is something you do yourself.
The one outbound request the interface can make is for map tiles on the office map, and that happens only if you choose to open the map.
For the platform, the services offered on it and the company behind it, see About TakumiPen.
Government sources verified 2026-08-18. Each page links the sources it used.
