In France we don’t need to register when we’re moving. We have the right to live anywhere we want without notice.
Some consider a freedom not to be registered at all.
Personal identity card is not mandatory and we also don’t need to renew the driving license.

When I moved to Alsace, a french region with some german laws, I was surprised when 2 cops came to my new home because I didn’t register!

mina-san

In England you do not have to register officially unless you are an alien (but that’s about immigratin stuff and you only do it once), the address will be enough to attact council tax! You do need an address to receive benefits if you are poor though- which is a problem for homeless people.You do not need an identity document whihc makes it difficult to prove who you are sometimes.

In Italy it is another story. You need to register twice, once with the police and once with the borough council. If you do not register with the borough council as a resident, you get taxed as a non resident ( someone who as a second home there) which makes for a big difference in taxes [ to your disadvantage].

As not registering with the council is an offence which attracts a hefty fine, this is rather important.

There has been a recent case of English people who have moved their residence to Italy not knowing this double obligation rule. The police did not bother to clarify this obligation with them when they registered with the police.

A few years later the council found out and they were heavily fined by the council and to add insult to injury they had already overpaid considerably on all the rates because the council had been charging as second-home owners as well!

Rather Kafkian don’t you think?

Needless to say, an identity card is compulsory in Italy- just existing is not a prove that you are there!

BTW, the 年金 pension book must be the book where you pay your contributes to get a pension when you are old, right? If so, Alain-san, you will have a pension book as a young person to collect pay into.

Yoroshikuonegaishimasu.

mikuji

面白いlessonですね！And I actually have one of those personal stamps ( 判子), since when i was living in Japan I needed one to get a bank account. As a foreigner I obviously needed to get one custom made, which although a teensy bit pricey (I think it was like 3500 yen or something) it was pretty cool!! As 幸子さん suggested, I took a picture of my 判子, which is available at:
http://web.mit.edu/~anita7/www/Anita%27s%20website/Cool%20Japan%20Stuff.html

Anyway, I agree, having a custom-made 判子 is pretty cool! Even though now I’m living in the US and thus never ever use it, I show it to all my Japanese friends, and they always get a kick out of it. It’s funny how my last name is so long that it needed two columns!

And I didn’t realize this at the time, but I realized that instead of getting my name spelled out in katakana (ビヤヌエバ）, I could have actually chosen a Japanese name with the same meaning. My last name (”Villanueva”) means “new village” in Spanish, so I guess the equivalent of that in Japanese is　新村　(Aramura), which has the same meaning. 面白い！！！　:)

Btw, I have one question: when I was in Japan, I always heard those personal stamps referred to as 判子. But in this lesson they were referred to as 印鑑. どう違いますか？

アニタ

Wow, I think this is a great idea to actually forego the english translation of the dialogue. It is more like an intermediate lesson. I know when I was taking intermediate courses in college, there is no English allowed at ALL in the class. Everything is learned from Japanese. The same is true of the Advanced classes I took. I typically never listen to the English translation portion anyway, and am forced to skip it. I just hope it wasn’t a mistake, and that lessons continue in this format. Removing the crutch for people tends to help them learn faster. If anything, if people don’t understand a word they hear, and it isn’t discussed in the goi section, they can always look it up at wwwjdic.

Wow, took me a while to listen to it this week, but this was the best Intermediate lesson ever… there was so much content, so much chatter and interesting subject matter. I don’t know why but the girls are much chattier when Peter isn’t around…