Belief it or not, we are still in New Jersey. For those who were expecting us to be in Tokyo by now (and that certainly includes us), a quick recap is in order.
Soon after we got to New Jersey, it became clear that our visas would not be ready in time. Now it is possible for US and NL nationals to travel to Japan as tourists entirely without visas, so that did not appear to be such a big problem, however, as it turns out, one cannot change one's status from tourist to a working resident while in the country. Indeed, the visas that we must obtain to become a legitimate working class person had to be applied for in person by myself and R, the children did not need to go. So this meant that if we were to go to Tokyo as we had planned, we would have to make a trip back to the US to get our visas (we thought we would just apply for them in Seoul, but that does not fly as you must apply in your country of residence). Moreover, for a long time it looked like we would even have to go back to California for our visas, as the Japanese consulates only serve the residents in the local region. Fortunately, we were able to convince the New York consulate officials that we are now living in New Jersey, so we did not have to go back to California for the visas.
But we did have to rearrange a host of other things, for one, we had to cancel our flights and could not book new ones until we were relatively sure when our certificates of eligibility would arrive. The host organization in Japan would be sending those, but the paperwork was at the ministery of justice and when they would receive them back was not clear. Also, we lost our apartment that we had so painstakingly arranged.
Fortunately, everything seems to be back on track. We are now planning to leave on July 17th (from JFK), arriving in Japan on the 18th, sleeping in a hotel for one night and then getting an apartment.Given all we went through it is quite amazing we will only have less than 2 week delay.
8:48:14 PM 
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