Juminhyo Translation (住民票): Japan's Residence Record for USCIS

The juminhyo (住民票), often rendered in English as a certificate of residence or resident record, is a record of a person's current registered residential address and household. It is maintained under Japan's Basic Resident Registration system by the municipal office — the city, ward, town or village (市区町村) — where the person lives. Both Japanese nationals and registered foreign residents are recorded.

The document an applicant receives is technically a copy of the residence record (住民票の写し, juminhyo no utsushi): a certified extract bearing the municipality's official seal and the name and title of the issuing mayor (市区町村長). The master record itself never leaves the municipal database, which is why every legitimate juminhyo carries the municipal stamp and a certification block.

A juminhyo can be issued for a single individual (本人のみ) or for the whole household (世帯全員) showing every member living together, and a partial-household version (世帯の一部) lists only selected members. The requester chooses what to include or omit, which matters for both privacy and evidentiary value.

Because the document is anchored to where you live rather than to a fixed family domicile, it is the natural source of proof for a current address or for showing that two people share one household. That is the lens through which to read everything else in this guide, including its limits for U.S. immigration purposes covered on our USCIS document requirements page.

The single most important thing to understand is that a juminhyo is not a koseki (戸籍, family register). The koseki records vital family events — birth, marriage, divorce, death, adoption — and is tied to the honseki (本籍, registered domicile). It exists only for Japanese nationals. The juminhyo records where a person currently lives and the composition of their household, and it covers foreign residents too.

This distinction is not academic. The U.S. Department of State's reciprocity schedule for Japan names the family register (Koseki Tohon/Shohon) and the Certificate of Acceptance of Notification — such as a birth notification acceptance certificate (出生届受理証明書) or marriage notification acceptance certificate (婚姻届受理証明書) — as the accepted civil-document sources for birth, marriage, divorce and death. The same page explicitly lists a 'certificate of residence' among the documents that are not acceptable in lieu of the family register for proving birth.

In practical terms: if a filing calls for a birth or marriage certificate, the koseki-based document is required and a juminhyo will not satisfy it. Submitting a juminhyo as if it were a birth certificate is one of the most common and costly mistakes we see. For the family-register side of a Japanese file, see our companion certified koseki tohon translation.

Foreign residents appear on a juminhyo but never on any koseki, since the koseki is for Japanese nationals only. A foreign applicant in Japan therefore has a juminhyo for address and household evidence but turns to their home-country civil records — not a koseki — for birth or marriage proof.

A standard juminhyo carries the full name (氏名, shimei), current address (住所, jusho), date of birth (生年月日, seinengappi) and sex (性別, seibetsu). It typically also shows the head of household (世帯主, setainushi) and each member's relationship to that head (続柄, tsuzukigara), the date the person established residence or moved in, and often a previous address (前住所, zen-jusho).

Several items are optional and the requester decides whether to print them. The My Number / Individual Number (個人番号 / マイナンバー) and the eleven-digit Resident Record Code (住民票コード) are distinct identifiers that are usually omitted for submissions. The honseki and head of the family register (本籍・筆頭者) appear only for Japanese nationals and are frequently left off. The head-of-household and relationship fields can also be omitted, though for marriage and cohabitation cases you generally want them shown.

For foreign residents the record additionally carries nationality and region (国籍・地域, kokuseki / chiiki), status of residence (在留資格, zairyu shikaku), period of stay and its expiry (在留期間, zairyu kikan), and the residence card number (在留カード番号). These fields are what make a foreign resident's juminhyo a useful snapshot of their lawful status in Japan.

Dates are commonly printed in Japanese era (wareki) format using Reiwa (令和) or Heisei (平成). The issued copy closes with the municipal official seal (公印) and the mayor's title block. When we prepare a certified juminhyo translation we render every one of these fields, mark the seals as placeholders, and flag any item that appears blacked out or marked 省略 (omitted) rather than inventing a value.

A juminhyo functions as secondary, supporting evidence — never as a primary civil record. Its most common immigration use is to show a current or shared address and household composition. A whole-household juminhyo listing both spouses, and any children, at the same address is a practical way to support evidence of cohabitation and a bona-fide marriage in family-based petitions and adjustment or removal-of-conditions filings, alongside other proof such as joint financial records.

That maps onto green-card processes such as the I-130 petition, the I-485 adjustment application and the I-751 petition to remove conditions, where building a record of a genuine shared life is central. The relationship field (続柄) is exactly the data point that makes the document useful here, which is why dropping or blurring it undercuts its purpose. You can read more about these stages on our green card overview.

It also serves as general proof of residence or address for an applicant living in Japan. What it cannot do is prove birth or marriage; for those, the koseki or a Certificate of Acceptance of Notification is the required source, as the State Department's Japan schedule makes clear.

Whatever the role, any juminhyo submitted in Japanese must be accompanied by a full English translation certified as complete and accurate by a competent translator, per 8 CFR 103.2(b)(3), and you should submit a copy of the Japanese original alongside the translation. Our certified juminhyo translation includes that signed certification on every order.

The relationship field (続柄, tsuzukigara or zokugara) has no single clean English equivalent. We render each value precisely — 世帯主 as 'Head of household / Self', 妻 as 'Wife', 夫 as 'Husband', 子 as 'Child', and a cohabitant such as 同居人 as 'Cohabitant' — rather than collapsing everything into a vague 'family'. For marriage and cohabitation cases this precision is the document's evidentiary core.

The honseki (本籍) is the registered domicile, sometimes called permanent domicile. It is neither the current address nor the place of birth, so translating it loosely as 'residence' or 'domicile' without qualification is misleading. In practice it is often intentionally omitted from the copy anyway.

Japanese era dates must be converted to Gregorian. Reiwa year plus 2018 and Heisei year plus 1988 give the Western year, and the boundary on 1 May 2019 — where Heisei 31 became Reiwa 1 — is a frequent off-by-one trap. We show the source era date and its Gregorian equivalent so an adjudicator never has to do the math; an abbreviation like R8.5.7 expands to 令和8年5月7日 = 7 May 2026.

Two more areas need a steady hand. Names: a juminhyo for a Japanese national is often printed in kanji only, so we romanize per Hepburn and match the spelling on the applicant's passport to avoid an apparent identity discrepancy across the file — the subject of our name-mismatch guide. Status of residence (在留資格) entries are official immigration categories, so 永住者 becomes 'Permanent Resident' and 日本人の配偶者等 becomes 'Spouse or Child of Japanese National', using the recognized category names rather than a word-by-word rendering.

The headline error is treating a juminhyo as a birth or marriage certificate. It is neither, and the State Department explicitly lists a certificate of residence as not acceptable in lieu of the family register for proving birth. For those events the koseki or a Certificate of Acceptance of Notification is required, so confirm which document your filing actually calls for before ordering — our free requirements checker helps you sort that out.

A close second is submitting only the translation without a copy of the Japanese original, which is a frequent RFE trigger. Equally avoidable: omitting or mis-marking the official municipal seal and the mayor's certification block, since USCIS expects everything on the page to be accounted for.

On the data side, watch for era-date conversions that slip at the Heisei 31 / Reiwa 1 boundary or use the wrong offset, and never transcribe a My Number or Resident Record Code into the translation when it was meant to be left off — for submissions the document is normally issued without My Number, and copying it across is a needless privacy exposure.

Finally, name romanization that does not match the passport creates apparent identity discrepancies across an entire file, and each document needs its own translator certification — a single juminhyo certification cannot be stretched to cover other documents in the packet.