Tip: a photo of your passport and the stamp will most likely do in most circumstances. Much better than risking taking your passport with you all the time.
Bad advice. Photos are not accepted and police will expect you to carry your passport at all times, just as you're supposed to carry your residence card at all times if you have one.
Not sure why people want to stick to a rule that could get them in real trouble. I am speaking from real experience. The police is very unlikely to want to arrest/take you to the station for not having your passport. On the other hand, if you do lose your passport and you have a slow/far embassy then you are in real trouble.
The police will stop you for any random reason, including walking alone in the street at an unusual hour or just to check your bike.
From there, if you have nothing to officially prove your identity you might totally spend a while at the station, and potentially have them kindly escort you to your home so they get a look while you're looking for your passport.
All of this is just mild inconvenience, except it will happen a lot more frequently than losing one's passport.
PS: For the real trouble relative to passports, an embassy can reemit an emergency passport within a day, and you can probably reemit the visa at an immigration branch. It's not fun for sure, but I'm not sure it's real troubles.
> The police will stop you for any random reason, including walking alone in the street at an unusual hour or just to check your bike.
Parent was talking about Japan not the US. In most of the world, the police will leave you alone unless they have to intervene. In Japan, they’ll probably want to really help you and not add an arrest to their record.
> From there, if you have nothing to officially prove your identity you might totally spend a while at the station, and potentially have them kindly escort you to your home so they get a look while you're looking for your passport
Again, highly an American perspective where the police is fishing for arrest reasons. The rest of the world doesn’t allocate much resources to the police so they bus around people without very exigent reasons.
I was referring to Japan. Police will very easily stop you [0], the more you diverge from what they expect to see at that time and place, the higher your chances will be to have a chat with them.
As you point out, it's also not heavy and tensed confrontation as it could be in other countries. You won't get shot at a wrong move, officers are polite, they're not there to piss you, don't specially expect you to be in the wrong and really would prefer to get it done and go on with their watch.
That's where keeping credible papers on you makes it a painless 30s interaction and not a long and awkward drag to the station that nobody wants.
> The rest of the world doesn’t allocate much resources to the police
Japan police has a decent HR budget to keep officers around in the communities. Which is a truely good thing, police becomes very integrated to the daily life of the people there, while fully expecting to have nothing to do all day long outside of helping elderlies cross the street and dealing with kids getting lost.
[0] At least I got stopped a decent amount, and that is a pretty shared sentiment I heard a lot. The only exceptions were daily suit people and women.
I carry a locally notarized photocopy of my passport in a similar country. I am not sure if it is fully legal, but people tend to do that here in practice, particularly when the government office needs your passport for processing.
The court was willing to stamp and sign that I have that passport and it matches me, so it is probably good enough for most police if I offer to show them the original at home.
I cannot think of any circumstances where someone would be demanding to see your passport and then accept a photo of your passport instead.
That being said having a photo of your passport and relevant stamps is good advice, but only to make it slightly easier to deal with all the hassel that comes if you do lose your passport.
In most countries you can get what is called a notarized or certified "true copy" of identifying documents (passports being one of them). The intent is for you to submit them with applications so you don't have to submit the original copy. Now how you get a true copy depends on the country. Canadian passports for example can only have true copies made by their embassy or immigrations offices.
Note that this doesn't include your passport stamp pages but Japan hasn't issued passport stamps for several years now and they just look up your passport in a registry instead. So for that purpose, a true copy should be effectively the same thing.
That's where it comes down to what is essentially a technicality but given they carry an embossed seal and signature with the words "TRUE COPY" on them, they look very official and officials are very rarely going to push back on it even if whether they are to be treated as a full substitute for a passport (for identification purposes) is technically a grey area.
I don't think so. My passport is somewhere around the house so I can't just grab it to check but last time I came in they just put it on a scanner and took a photograph of me when I went through immigration.
Disappointing, but inevitable I suppose. Thank you for the ground truth. I’ll try to make Japan an intentional segment during my next international trip to confirm and report back.
> I cannot think of any circumstances where someone would be demanding to see your passport and then accept a photo of your passport instead.
Unless you are involved with a particular interaction, they just want to check your visa status. A passport photo/stamp will do if their system is digitized. Arresting someone (except for the US where the police likes to arrest people) is a major hassle.