Now that I have less than a year left on my initial 3 year spouse visa, we have started thinking about the renewal process. However, we just discovered that, in theory at least, I qualify for permanent residency.

My wife and I have been married for way longer than the required 3 years and I have been living in Japan for longer than the required 1 year.

So, we will start preparing for that application instead, but soon, as I read the processing time can be very long for PR applications.

There are no guarantees of course, I am in my final year of a part-time, minimum wage contract. My wife has a little over a year left of the same contract. We still have some funds from selling our house in Scotland though so we should hopefully be covered there. Aside from their potential concerns about our financial stability though, I cannot see any other areas where they might be concerned.

There will be paperwork involved of course, but most of it is evidence based document collating, unlike a UK permanent residency application which has an enormous amount of form-filling. The main application form seems to be just 2 A4 pages in size.. unless I am missing something.

Whilst this is the first visa renewal or PR application for me, I have was obviously very involved in (the far more laborious) renewals and PR applications for my wife in Scotland, I would be very happy if this was the last one I had to do.