Visa for my Japanese spouse.

I thought I will share our visa story and maybe there will be someone who might find something useful from our story and apply it to their efforts to get a visa for their spouse. I will not use our real names but let's say my name is Chris and my spouse's name is Hana. I am Latvian national livening and working in the UK and my spouse is Japanese coming to UK whenever her 6 month a year tourist visa allows her to.

We were very close and one day after Hana's visa expired again, she returned to Japan and we decided that next time she comes back to the UK we need to sort her out a proper visa so we wouldn't need to worry about that again therefore our steps were:

1) Get married in Japan on paper only with no ceremony.
- It was very easy. I just needed to send some papers and passport copy to her to Japan and she registered our marriage there while I was in the UK.

2) Apply for EEA Family Permit in UK so she could come for another 6 months
- Straight after Hana got our marriage papers, she sent them for official translation. It took only about 20 days altogether and when she received the translated papers back she handed them in with the rest of the documents for EEA Family Permit. She got the 6 months permit after about 10 days.

3) Apply her for spouse visa during those 6 months that would grant her 5 years UK residency here as my wife.
- This was a bit longer process as we knew that it won't be as easy as the EEA Family Permit. There was more paperwork to be done so we gathered all information we could about ourselves being together - lots of pictures of us and our families together, our Facebook correspondence (all 300 pages!), email correspondence, some proofs of addresses where we lived together in UK, etc. Also translated receipts of the venue where we were going to get married (the ceremony would take place about 9 months from sending in the application).
- Our main worry was that our marriage was registered in Japan, not here in the UK and we haven't done any real ceremony. We didn't even have marriage rings or anything like that.
- Also, my personal worry was that our situation wasn't very normal so I always thought maybe we should have paid an agency (about £500 - £1000) to do it all for us or at least check our application, but at the end we decided that we won't do that and we will rely on the free information including this forum.

4) After about 5 months we got the visa for Hana. A very happy moment for us.

I hope this story can help someone to prepare for their visa as there were so many tips on this website that helped us get ours.

I imagine that you didn't apply for a spouse visa. Members should understand that as a Lativan national you applied for a 5 year family permit under EEA Regulations, but by all means correct me if I'm wrong.

Casa wrote:I imagine that you didn't apply for a spouse visa. Members should understand that as a Lativan national you applied for a 5 year family permit under EEA Regulations, but by all means correct me if I'm wrong.

Is it called a 5-year residence permit?