It's that time of the decade again. By now, all households in Japan should have received and submitted Japan's National Census (kokusei chosa), a survey taken every five years expressly to assist in policymaking, drawing up electoral districts and other matters of taxation and representation. This of course includes non-Japanese (NJ) on visas of three months or longer. Get yours?

This time the Japanese government did some nice things for NJ: It offered a multilingual website (Japanese, Korean, Chinese, Portuguese and English) explaining the hows and whys of the census. It also offered the census itself in 27 different languages, along with enhanced privacy protection measures. You can send the form in yourself, for example, so you don't have some nosy census-taker peering over your shoulder (with the white-hot curiosity some people display over anything an NJ does).

Class act. A golden "Attaboy!" from this columnist.