Reserve Shit Like it's the 90s

When opening a food business, health safety is of paramount importance. If customers drop like flies after a visit to your establishment you won't be in business very long. In order to make sure that businesses are following health guidelines, food service businesses in Tokyo are required to appoint a qualified person to be responsible for food hygiene. This person is, unsurprisingly, called the Person Responsible for Food Hygiene, or 食品衛生責任者 in Japanese.

Okay...

So what is a food hygiene responsible person (let's just call it the FRP) responsible for? According to the Tokyo Food Sanitation Association (一般社団法人東京都食品衛生協会), the FRP must

Becoming an FRP

That all sounds very dry and horrible, but if it has to be done then there's no point in making a fuss. Clearly I'm going to need one of these, so how does one become an FRP? There are two ways.

The first way is to be a qualified person. Qualified persons are nutritionists, cooks, slaughterhouse hygiene managers, ship cooks, and people who have some sort of education in hygeine management (doctors, dentists, veterinarians, pharmacists, etc.). That's right, you can hire your dentist to be your FRP.

The less ridiculous way, and probably the path followed by most people, is to take a training course approved by the governor of Tokyo. After some searching the only course I could find is the one offered by the Tokyo Food Sanitation Association. This course is six hours long and costs 12,000 yen.

Sounds easy enough

Thinking this would be a cake walk, I was planning on putting it off until just before opening. But, as I was doing company setup stuff, for some reason it was itching in the back of my mind, and it wouldn't go away. So, just to be safe, I looked into the reservation process to get an idea of how far in advance I would have to register. What I found was insane.

The registration is completely paper based. I expected there to be an ugly registration form I could use to select a date to reserve, but all there was is a schedule for the next few months with the course capacity and currently enrolled students next to each day. In order to register, you have to print out an application form, fill it in with three candidate dates, in order of preference, then mail it to the office along with a stamped return envelope. I cannot remember the last time I had to provide a return envelope for anything! What is this, the nineties?!

At least the website shows the number of open seats for each day, so people don't have to choose dates blind. Thinking, oh shit, I'd better do this NOW, I printed the application and pulled up the schedule to choose a date. All dates in January and February are full! Ugh. March has some open days, but if they fill up before I can get a reservation then I may end up having to push back my opening date to April, which would suuuuck, especially because my leave from work ends at the end of March. I chose the earliest dates in March that were still open and posted the application form ten minutes later. Now all that's left is to cross my fingers and hope that I get one of those slots.