- Two different things are being checked, and confusing them is what makes this look impossible. One is your My Number. The other is that you are the person the number belongs to. Almost every question about documents resolves once you see which of the two a given piece of paper is answering.
- Osaka City and Higashiosaka City set out three acceptable document patterns: a copy of both sides of a My Number Card on its own; a notification card together with an identity document; or a copy of a residence record showing your My Number together with an identity document.
- Where those cities enumerate acceptable photo identification, the zairyu card and the special permanent resident certificate appear on the list by name. This is not a workaround. It is published municipal guidance.
- Portal guidance is written for the general case. Furunavi's one-stop explanation names a driving licence and a passport as the photo identification examples, and does not name the zairyu card. That is a gap in an example list, not a statement that the card is unacceptable, and it is not a reason to conclude the scheme is closed to you.
- What decides your case is the recipient municipality. It sets the document requirements for donations made to it, so the list that governs you is on that municipality's own page and nowhere else. Check it before you send anything, especially where a January deadline leaves no room to correct a rejected packet.
- A My Number Card issued to a mid-to-long-term resident carries a validity period tied to the period of stay, as the Ministry of Internal Affairs and Communications and the Digital Agency explain. Renewing your status does not renew the card by itself, and an expired card takes the simplest of the three patterns away from you.
There is a particular moment that stops foreign residents halfway through furusato nozei. You have chosen a municipality, the donation has gone through, and now a page appears listing the documents to send with the application form. It names a driving licence. It names a passport. You have neither in a usable form, or you have a passport whose address page means nothing in Japan, and the list stops there. The reasonable conclusion is that the scheme was not built with you in mind and the sensible thing is to stop.
That conclusion is wrong, and this article explains exactly why, using what municipalities publish rather than what a portal's example list happens to include. The general question of whether the scheme applies to you at all is settled in the main article on furusato nozei for foreign residents. This one is about paper.
Start by separating the two checks
The document requirements make no sense as a flat list and complete sense as two questions asked in sequence.
The first question is what your My Number is. The municipality needs the number itself, from a source that is unambiguously official.
The second question is whether you are the person that number belongs to. This is an identity check, and it is the one that photo identification answers.
Every acceptable combination is a way of answering both. Once you hold that structure in your head, the lists stop looking arbitrary, and more importantly you can read an unfamiliar municipality's page and work out immediately what it is asking for.
The three patterns
Osaka City and Higashiosaka City both publish the same three-way structure for the documents accompanying a one-stop application.
| Pattern | What you send | Why it works |
|---|---|---|
| My Number Card alone | A copy of both sides of the card. | The card answers both questions at once. The number is on one side and the photograph and personal details are on the other, which is why nothing else is needed alongside it. |
| Notification card plus identification | The notification card, together with an identity document. | The notification card supplies the number but carries no photograph, so an identity document has to supply the second half. |
| Residence record plus identification | A copy of a residence record that shows your My Number, together with an identity document. | Same structure. The residence record supplies the number; the identity document supplies the identity. This is the pattern to remember, because a residence record showing the number can be obtained from the municipal office where you live. |
Notice what the second and third patterns have in common. Both of them need an identity document, and neither of them specifies that it must be a driving licence. That is the opening, and it is not a loophole.
Where the zairyu card appears
When Osaka City and Higashiosaka City enumerate what counts as photo identification for this purpose, the zairyu card is on the list by name. So is the special permanent resident certificate.
This deserves a plain statement because so much English-language discussion of the subject is speculative. These are not officers making an exception at a counter. These are published lists on municipal pages, naming the documents that mid-to-long-term residents and special permanent residents actually hold.
It also makes sense on its own terms. The zairyu card is a photographic identity document issued by a Japanese government body, showing name, date of birth, nationality and address. It is the document that Japanese administrative procedures generally expect a mid-to-long-term resident to produce. There was never a reason to expect it to be excluded here.
So why does the portal not mention it?
Because a portal is writing one page for the whole country. Furunavi's explanation of the one-stop procedure gives a driving licence and a passport as its examples of photo identification. The zairyu card is not among them.
Read that for what it is. It is an example list on a commercial site, written for the typical user, and its silence about a document is not a ruling on that document. The entity with the authority to decide what it will accept is the municipality receiving your donation, and Osaka City and Higashiosaka City have exercised that authority in writing.
This is the structural problem worth naming, because it recurs across Japanese online services. The guidance you meet first is the portal's, because that is where the donation happens. The guidance that actually governs is the municipality's, and you have to go and find it. Every year, people who were fully entitled to the deduction abandon the process at a portal help page. The help page was not wrong. It was simply not the authority.
The limit of what can be promised
Two cities publishing the zairyu card in their lists is strong evidence that the document is ordinary and accepted, and it is not a nationwide guarantee. Nothing here says the position is identical in a town you have never heard of that happens to produce excellent rice.
Requirements for the documents accompanying a donation are set by the municipality receiving it, which makes the operative list the one published on that municipality's own page. Practically this means one extra step: before you post anything, open the recipient's furusato nozei page and read its document section. If it is not clear, the municipality's contact details are on the same page.
Do this before the end of the year rather than in January. Under the one-stop route the application has to reach the municipality by January 10 of the year following the donation, and a packet rejected for documents on January 8 cannot realistically be fixed. The full mechanics of that deadline, and the alternative route when it is missed, are in the article comparing the one-stop exception with the tax return.
The My Number Card has an expiry problem that is specific to you
The first pattern is the easiest by a wide margin. One card, both sides, nothing else. Which is why the following detail matters so much.
Material published by the Ministry of Internal Affairs and Communications and the Digital Agency explains that when a mid-to-long-term resident holds a My Number Card, the card's validity period is tied to the period of stay. If the period of stay is not extended, or the card is not dealt with in step with the extension, the card can cease to be valid.
Sit with the consequence. A Japanese national's My Number Card quietly renews on its own schedule and nothing else in their life touches it. Yours is attached to your immigration status. You can renew your status successfully, receive a new zairyu card, and be holding a My Number Card that no longer does the job, without any single moment at which somebody told you so.
The recovery is not dramatic. If the card is not usable, you fall back to the third pattern: a residence record showing your My Number, plus your zairyu card as the identity document. That is a counter visit and a fee rather than a catastrophe. But it is a counter visit you want to discover in November, not on January 8.
If you have renewed your period of stay in the last year or so, check the validity date on your My Number Card now, while nothing depends on it. The check takes seconds. The alternative is discovering it inside the one week of the year when the fallback takes longer than the time remaining.
The same coupling between immigration status and civic paperwork shows up whenever your address changes, and the residence card side of that is covered in the article on changing your address on a residence card. Keeping the address consistent across your card, the resident register and any form you have already sent is not administrative fussiness here; under the one-stop route an address mismatch has consequences of its own.
Your name, and the honest limits of what is published
This is where a lot of English-language advice becomes confident without cause, so here is the position as it stands.
What a registered alias can be
Some foreign residents register a tsusho, a commonly used name held alongside the legal name on the resident register. Shiki City publishes the character restriction: a tsusho may be composed of hiragana, katakana, or kanji excluding traditional and simplified Chinese forms. The Latin alphabet is not permitted, and neither is hangul.
That is a genuine constraint on what an alias can even be. A resident whose name is written in the Latin alphabet or in hangul cannot simply register it as a tsusho in that form, so the alias is not a general-purpose way of making a Japanese form easier to complete.
The alias is not printed on your zairyu card
Shiki City also states that the tsusho is not shown on the zairyu card.
This is the practical point. If you use an alias in daily life and write it on a form, the photo identification you enclose will show a different name, because the card shows the legal name. From the reviewing officer's side, the form and the identification do not match, and a mismatch is a reason to come back to you at exactly the moment there is no time.
What nobody has published
We looked for an official instruction on which form of your name to write on a one-stop application: the legal name, a registered alias, or a Latin-alphabet rendering. We could not find one, and we are not going to invent it.
So we will not tell you which to use. What we can tell you is what reduces the risk of a mismatch, and it is unglamorous. Make the name on the form, the name on the identity document you enclose, and the name held on the resident register agree with each other. Where a portal account name differs from that, be aware of the discrepancy rather than surprised by it. And where you are genuinely unsure, the municipality receiving the donation is the body that will process the form, so it is the body worth asking.
Assembling the packet without drama
Bring the pieces together and the task is small. It is only intimidating when it is undefined.
Work out which of the three patterns you are using, and prefer the one whose documents you already hold in valid form. Confirm that your My Number Card, if you are relying on it, has not lapsed with your period of stay. Read the recipient municipality's document list rather than a general one. Check that the name and address on your identity document match what you are writing on the form and what the resident register holds. Then copy the documents, keep a copy of the copies, and send the packet in time to arrive rather than in time to be posted.
One packet per recipient municipality, incidentally. The one-stop application is sent to each municipality you gave to, so the document work scales with the number of recipients, which is one more argument for keeping the list short.
Documents assembled for one Japanese procedure tend to be the same documents needed for the next one, and if you are early in your time here the wider pattern of who asks for what is set out in the article on the documents needed to rent an apartment. The zairyu card does most of the work in both places.
Check the municipality's document list before you donate, not after
The recipient decides which documents it accepts, so the page you need is the one belonging to the municipality you are about to choose. Furunavi is published in Japanese with no language switch, so read it with the three patterns above already in mind and you will recognise what you are looking at. Choosing a municipality whose requirements you can meet is easier than negotiating afterwards.
The other documents in the process
Identity paperwork is the part people worry about. The paperwork that actually goes missing is the paperwork that arrives by post.
Each recipient municipality issues a receipt for your donation, and it is the document the tax return route runs on. When it will reach you is not knowable in advance, and Furunavi says as much in plain terms: the receipt being a document the municipality issues, it cannot answer questions about when delivery will take place. Treat that as a planning constraint. Do not donate in the days before you move, make sure post to your address can still reach you, and photograph each receipt on the day it arrives.
There is also a consolidated certificate for the donation deduction. Furunavi puts it on the account page for download once January 10 of the year after the donation has passed, issues it in no paper form, and limits it to donations placed while you were signed in. Donating logged in, on a single account, is therefore a documentation decision as much as a convenience one.
If a departure from Japan is anywhere in view, the whole document question changes character, because paper posted to an address you have left is paper you will not see. That situation, along with what happens to a deduction when residence ends, is dealt with in the article on furusato nozei and leaving Japan.
Two things not to let into the decision
The first is payment method treated as an afterthought. Furunavi lists credit cards along with Furunavi Money, Amazon Pay, PayPay, Rakuten Pay and d-barai among the accepted methods, and states that what is available differs by municipality. Where you have the choice, a card or a smartphone payment service completes the donation inside the portal with a dated record attached to your account, and that record is what the consolidated certificate is built from. Bank transfer, postal transfer, cash by registered mail and payment at a counter push part of the transaction outside the portal and make the trail harder to reassemble.
The second is point rewards. Furunavi's own notice puts the end of Furunavi Coin awards for donations at the end of September 2025, with a donation dated October 1, 2025 or later falling outside the scheme even if a review is posted; coins still in hand run out at the end of the month twelve months on from the award. There is nothing there to optimise. Decide on the documents you can produce and the municipalities you want to support.
And keep the amount sensible. The published tables of suggested donation amounts by income and family composition are guidelines rather than a calculation of your personal figure, which is a point developed in the article on the donation limit. Sending a large donation to a municipality whose document requirements you have not read is the combination worth avoiding.
FAQ
Can I use my zairyu card as identification for furusato nozei?
Osaka City and Higashiosaka City both name the zairyu card, and the special permanent resident certificate, in their published lists of acceptable photo identification for this purpose. So in those municipalities the answer is yes and it is unremarkable. What cannot be promised is that the position is identical everywhere, because the document requirements are set by the municipality receiving the donation. Read the recipient's own page before you send anything.
The portal only lists a driving licence and a passport. Does that mean I cannot apply?
No. Furunavi's one-stop explanation gives those two as examples of photo identification and does not mention the zairyu card, but a portal example list is not the rule. The municipality receiving your donation decides what it accepts, and municipalities including Osaka and Higashiosaka publish the zairyu card among acceptable documents. Go to the recipient's page rather than concluding from the portal's silence.
What are the three document patterns?
As published by Osaka City and Higashiosaka City: a copy of both sides of a My Number Card on its own; a notification card together with an identity document; or a copy of a residence record showing your My Number together with an identity document. The logic is that two things are being verified, the number and your identity, and each pattern covers both. The card covers both by itself, which is why it stands alone.
My My Number Card seems to have expired. How?
Because for a mid-to-long-term resident the card's validity period is tied to the period of stay, as the Ministry of Internal Affairs and Communications and the Digital Agency explain. Renewing your status does not by itself keep the card current, so a valid status and an invalid card can coexist. If that is your position, use the third pattern instead: a residence record showing your My Number, obtained from your municipal office, together with your zairyu card as the identity document.
Should I write my legal name or my registered alias on the form?
There is no official instruction on this that we could find, so we will not pretend to one. What is documented is that a tsusho may only be composed of hiragana, katakana or kanji excluding traditional and simplified Chinese forms, with the Latin alphabet and hangul not permitted, and that the tsusho is not printed on the zairyu card. Shiki City publishes both points. The consequence to work with is that a name on the form which does not match the identity document you enclose creates a discrepancy someone has to resolve. Keep the form, the identification and the resident register consistent, and ask the recipient municipality if you are unsure.
Do I send documents to every municipality I donated to?
Under the one-stop route, yes. The application goes to each recipient municipality, so the document work multiplies by the number of recipients, and each one may express its requirements slightly differently. That is a reason to keep the list of municipalities short. The alternative route replaces the per-municipality applications with a single filing, and the comparison is set out in the article on the one-stop exception and the tax return.
Where do I get a residence record showing my My Number?
From the municipal office of the municipality where you are registered as a resident, which is the same office that handles your address notifications. The version you need is the one that shows the My Number, since a standard copy issued without it does not answer the first of the two questions. Ask specifically for a copy including the individual number, and allow time for the visit rather than leaving it to the first working days of January.
Is any of this available in English?
Not on the portal. Furunavi is published in Japanese only, with no language switch and no translated help centre, and municipal furusato nozei pages are generally Japanese as well, although a municipality's separate pages for foreign residents sometimes are not. The approach that works is to learn the structure first, in the three-pattern form above, so that you are matching a Japanese page to something you already understand rather than translating it cold.
What if my packet is rejected?
Under the one-stop route the application has to arrive by January 10 of the year following the donation, so a rejection close to that date leaves effectively no time to resend. The fallback is the tax return, which is why the receipts matter even when you intended never to use them. Keep every receipt and, if you donated while logged in, remember that the consolidated certificate becomes downloadable from January 10 as well.
Does the receipt come quickly enough to matter?
There is no published timescale, and Furunavi says outright that the receipt is a municipal document and it therefore cannot answer questions about when it will turn up. Build your plans on that. The controllable parts are on your side: do not donate immediately before an address change, keep your postal arrangements intact, and photograph documents as they arrive rather than filing them and hoping.
You have the documents. That was the hard part.
If your My Number Card is current, or you can obtain a residence record showing the number, and you hold a zairyu card as photo identification, you can produce what these municipalities ask for. What remains is choosing where to give, and confirming that the recipient's own document page matches the pattern you plan to use.
