Any foreigner living in Japan must possess a residence card especially if they are working here or are students of a Japanese University. If you are highly skilled labour, you will most probably get 5 years of validity on your residence card which I got when I first came here.
But, last month when I was planning a trip to Switzerland with my family, I noticed that my card was expiring in less than 3 months from the date of return to Japan. I thought who cares, it is a small glitch and anyone will be ok with that but as it happened to be it was not. So, the only 2 options I was left was to call off my trip (meaning cancellation of all my hotel, flights and other bookings, plus cancellation of my PTOs which are by themselves very hard to get by in Japan) and the other was to try to get my Japanese residence card renewed and then go with the flow of things.
So, I chose the second choice of course. But, little did I know that on the day when I went to apply for my residence card extension, I was abruptly shooed away as one cannot apply for the extension of visa if their visa is not expiring within 3 months of the date of application. So, disheartened as I was, I thought of giving up all hope but then it struck to me, why not give it a chance and ask someone in the Tokyo Immigration Office for help, and bingo there it was the much needed blessing in disguise. They had a provision that if you are traveling to some other country for the purpose of business or medical reasons you can apply for the visa extension in advance i.e. more than the 3 months of application. For my case there was still 4.5 months until my Japanese visa was going to expire.
So, as I gathered myself and went to apply for the same, I was asked to first get a discussion clearance certificate from C5 counter located on the 2nd Floor. Then, I talked to the very polite Japanese officer in Japanese language (not sure if they spoke English as I did not even try), and she asked me to write down all the reasons for this early application on a paper with hand in Japanese and yeah better if it was in Kanjis. Enlightened as I was by now with the possibility of all going well, I did exactly what she said. First I formulated the whole sentences in Japanese in my brain and then wrote them down to Google Translate (Japanese to English for correction check) and then finally after refining I was ready to copy those Kanjis from the text of the app to the paper using the only pen I had brought that day. After this was over, I got a stamped paper and was asked to move to A1 counter to apply for the visa just as others did.
It takes time about 3-4 hours usually and when you need consultation, even more but not so much, may be like 1-2 hours extra. And by the end of 3 weeks from the date of application (actually 25 days to be precise) I got my new Japanese Residence Card and was able to get the Swiss visa later on.