Press Kit

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Fact sheet

About the app

One sentence

Daruma turns the paperwork of moving to Japan into a dated task list built around your visa, your ward and your arrival date.

One paragraph

Moving to Japan means residence cards, city hall, health insurance, a bank account, a phone contract and a pension enrolment — most of it on a deadline, most of it in Japanese, and none of it explained in one place. Daruma asks a few questions about your visa, nationality, destination and arrival date, then generates the list of things you personally have to do, in the order they have to happen, with the legal deadlines attached. It scans Japanese letters and explains them, names the counter and floor at your local ward office, and answers questions through a coach that already knows your situation.

Full version

The information needed to move to Japan legally already exists. It is on ward office websites, in Japanese, spread across dozens of pages, and it quietly assumes you already know which procedures apply to you. Nobody hands a new arrival the list.

Daruma is that list. It asks about visa type, nationality, destination city and arrival date, and produces a task plan for those specific circumstances — someone arriving on a work visa with a job already lined up sees something different from someone moving wards after three years. Each task carries its real deadline, is marked when it is a legal requirement rather than a nice-to-have, and names the office that handles it.

Three things happen on top of that list. The camera reads Japanese mail and says in English what the document is, whether it needs paying, and by when. Ward office data covers all 23 Tokyo special wards and 12 other cities, down to the floor and counter number and which weekend openings will not accept a move-in notification. And an AI coach answers questions without needing the situation explained again each time.

The app is deliberately narrow. It does not teach Japanese, find apartments or offer legal advice. It tracks obligations and deadlines, and it is kept current, because out-of-date guidance about immigration rules is worse than none.

Key features

• Generates a personal task list from your visa type, nationality, destination and arrival date, with each statutory deadline attached and legal requirements marked as such.
• Reads Japanese letters through the phone camera and explains in English what the document is, whether it needs paying, and by when.
• Names the exact counter and floor at your local ward office, covering all 23 Tokyo special wards and 12 further cities, including which weekend openings cannot process a move-in notification.
• Answers questions through an AI coach that already knows your visa, your ward and what you have completed.
• Supplies the Japanese phrases needed at the counter, in Japanese, romaji and spoken audio.
• Tracks the obligations that arrive later — residence card renewal, the second-year residence tax, pension enrolment — on a multi-year view.

Screenshots

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Icon

App icon, 512×512 PNG. Please do not alter it.

About the developer

Kayne Sheenan is a New Zealander living in Tokyo, where he works in software. He first came to Japan on a working holiday from university in Australia, studied at Fukuoka University as an exchange student, and moved back to Tokyo in 2023 after several years away.

He built Daruma after the second move, when it turned out that neither he nor his employer — who had never hired a foreign national before — could work out what to bring to the immigration office. It is his first app.

The longer version is on the launch post. For background on him rather than the app, see X or LinkedIn.

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