Trouble At The Passport Office

For our summer vacation this year we are planning to fly to Hawaii to attend our friends’ wedding on Oahu. The simple task of getting a passport for Fuzuki has been about as easy as killing a mosquito with a lawn mower! (For those of you who have tried this, you will know what I’m talking about.)

The first troubles came when we went to get a passport photo taken at a professional studio. We were informed at that time that we could not a photo taken of Fuzuki until he could sit up by himself (at that time he could barely even keep his chin up). So we took him home and tried to photograph him on the floor. Getting a 3 month old to look at a camera is like getting an ice cream cone to stay frozen in the desert, it ain’t gonna happen! That doesn’t even include that shots where he is looking, but has his tongue sticking out or he is blowing spit bubbles.

At the passport office we were informed of a few things. 1) that our son had acne... and maybe he’d want to wait until it cleared up (I don’t know any babies that vain) 2) that there was the slightest smudge of a shadow his ear (because he was lying down on a towel) and thus the photo would likely be rejected at some higher level of beaurocracy 3) Our sons name would PURPOSELY be spelled incorrectly!

1) and 2) were solved for $12 by shopping around at different photo studios and then waiting until a later date when Fuzuki could at least partially sit up. 3) was just stupid.

Thanks to a complete lack of common sense, the spelling of Fuzuki Raine Taylor on the passport was to become “Fuzuki Rein Teira”. This is apparently because, all records of Fuzuki in Japan exist only in Japanese, but a passport (even a Japanese one) has the name written in English. There is a set formula for translating back into English and according to these rules that spelling would end up as such. They told us that if we showed them his Canadian birth certificate with the correct spelling the would change the spelling.

Well Fuzuki wasn’t born in Canada so he doesn’t have a Canadian birth certificate. I did however apply for a certification of Canadian citizenship card (which he automatically qualifies for) back in December of last year. Upon checking on the status of this application, I am told only “It usually takes 6 months to a year.” Since we want fly in August, and need to book tickets before then, waiting around for some pencil pushers to come through in the pinch was not a chance we wanted to take. The Canadian consulate in Japan offered another option. For a quick $50 they would notarize a document saying that I had sworn to Fuzuki’s name.

$50, 7 emails, and 2 hours of travel each way later, I held the signed document in my hands, ready to go visit the mean man at the passport office again. The time was 1:30pm and I had just got home from the consulate. At 3:30pm the same day there was a knock on the door. It was the mailman, with an envelope from the Government of Canada. Fuzuki’s Citizenship Card.