Russian Mir Group Had A Problem With Japanese Immigration

[Mulboyne]

This account is from 2001 so it's nothing to do with the new rules but I thought it was interesting given the status of the group. They were tracking the Mir space station and had a small run-in with Japanese immigration while on their way to Fiji via Japan:

The day before the beginning of our trip to Fiji, the Russian Foreign Ministry strongly advised me to provide it with our itinerary. The reason for the Ministry's request was that our delegation included: high-ranking government official Elena Kondakova, who is not only a pilot-cosmonaut, but also a deputy of the Duma -- the lower chamber of the Russian parliament; three other pilot-cosmonauts (Sergey Avdeev, Musa Manarov, Vladimir Titov); one of Mir's chief designers (Leonid Gorshkov); and myself, an aerospace advisor to the governor of Moscow Region. Because of this, our group has an informal status of Russia's official representatives to the Mir deorbiting event...

...We did not anticipate any problem upon our arrival to Narita airport in Japan. We were transit passengers who, according to a local immigration law, were allowed to stay in the country up to 72 hours without visas. Besides, our stay in Japan was protected by Japanese transit visas that we had received in Moscow, just in case. The reality turned out to be different, however. Avdeev and Kondakova cleared immigration and control without problems. When Manarov, Gorshkov and I came to the immigration checkpoint, the smiling young women looked at our Japanese visas and suddenly started discussing something. Then they called a senior immigration officer who asked us to follow him. The officer brought us to a room which reminded me of a prison interrogation facility that I had seen in U.S. movies -- no windows, doors with locks on the outside, a few benches, chairs and a table. He politely but firmly asked us to stay there, took our passports and walked away.

Our initial reaction to this incident was to laugh. We had no reason to expect that anything was wrong with our passports or visas. We thought that it had been just a simple bureaucratic glitch that might happen anywhere and to anybody. After we had spent about an hour in this room without any word from the Japanese -- or Kondakova and Avdeev who were waiting for us somewhere outside the immigration checkpoint -- our mood changed.

Finally, the Japanese officer came to the room. He asked us in "English" (that sounded more like Japanese to me than any other language that I know) to prove that we were heading somewhere else in less than 48 hours, as indicated in our passports. I told him the tickets to Fiji were waiting for us at the Qantas airlines office and showed him a fax with copies of our Air Pacific airlines reservations. The officer explained to us that the fax was not enough and that he had to get a confirmation of our tickets reservations from Qantas, which helps Air Pacific handle its operations in Japan. Unfortunately, nobody was at the Qantas desk. The officer suggested that people from the desk had stepped out for lunch and asked us to wait for another 20 minutes.

Twenty more minutes passed. I called the officer in the adjacent room and tried to convince him we were not illegal immigrants, smugglers or terrorists, but people on an important official mission. I even jokingly called Musa Manarov a "Japanese national hero" because he flew in space with the first Japanese astronaut, Toyohiro Akiyama, in Soyuz TM-11 in 1990. This made no more of an impression on the officer, however, than if I told him that Manarov delivered pizzas. As it became clear later, the true reason for our detention turned out to be the inaccuracy of Japanese embassy officials in Moscow. They simply forgot to sign our visas! Somehow, Avdeevs and Kondakovas passports weren't thoroughly checked, but ours were and this is why we were detained.

Another 30 minutes passed. I stepped from the room and demanded to be put in touch with any Russian Aeroflot or embassy official in Tokyo. Five minutes later, an Aeroflot representative showed up in the room. He kindly asked us to excuse the Japanese immigration officials for the inconvenience, told us that he had already put our problem under his personal control and that in 10 more minutes the situation would be resolved. He kept his word. In 10 minutes the officer came to the room, asked for our apologies, returned our passports to us and blamed the problem on Japanese diplomats in Russia. Japanese immigration officials have no professional sympathy for Japanese embassy officials since the former belong to the Ministry of Justice while the latter report to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. We cleared immigration, rejoined Kondakova and Avdeev, and spent a wonderful day in Japan.

[Oradea]

Sounds like the immigrations guys were correct in what they did. The problem lies with the diplomats.

Interesting post Mulboyne, thanks for that.

[Doctor Stop]

Still, it's a step up from what they'd expect from immigration authorities in the Soviet Union.

[Mulboyne]

Sounds like the immigrations guys were correct in what they did.

The girl who noticed that the visas were unsigned seems to have done her job well. Whoever let the other two in the group pass through without noticing wasn't quite so hot.

[American Oyaji]

While that's true, this could have been cleared up by two quick phone calls.

One to the Russian embassy and a second to the Qantas counter. Japanese can be very bureaucratic just to be assholes sometimes.