My mother’s koseki tohon .

My Japanese mother needs her Kosekitohon from Kyushu. She was married to my filipino father in St. Ignatius church in Tokyo but the marriage certificate is not honored by Phil. The Japanese embassy doesn't authenticate it. She has to prove they are legally married so she can claim the SSS benefit of my deceased father.What shall I do?

I think the easiest way is to ask your mother's Japanese family to get and send it to the Philippines. If it is not your option, please take a look at this thread.
http://www.japan-guide.com/forum/quereadisplay.html?0+42979+...

Thank you for your help Jlady!

Is the marriage certificate of my parents from St. Ignatius Church in Tokyo registered in the Phil. Embassy?How do I have this authenticated . Jap. embassy won't do it in the Phil.

Hi, my mother's Koseki tohon is in Kyushu Minatoku.She does not know the whereabouts of her relatives anymore.Does anyone know who we should write to? Is there a fee? How do we send it if there is. I don't carry a credit card. What we really need is for the marriage certificate to be authenticated as legal doc. I'm so lost in translation..

Mariko,

You or your mother will need to contact the city office where her marriage was registered. You say "Minato-ku", but in which city was this?
Certificates issued by churches or other ceremonial places are just decorative pieces of paper with no legal meaning.

I have had my marriage certificate authenticated at the foreign department in Tokyo. We went there and could pick up the documents the next day. The Philippine authorities should be able to tell you what kind of authentication you need as there are several different ways of doing this (apostile, etc.).

With foreign department I meant the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Japan (MOFA). They have a counter service for these kinds of things.

Kappa,

But where was your marriage certificate from? Mariko is asking about a marriage certificate from Japan.
My understanding is that marriage certificates in Japan are just commemorative pieces of paper issued by wedding chapels and have no legal standing whatsoever.
Marriage in Japan is registered in the Koseki, which is why Mariko needs to get a copy from the city office in Japan where her mother registered her marriage.

My marriage certificate was from Japan. I fetched all paperwork from the Japanese City Hall (marriage certificate, birth certificate, koseki, etc) and took it to the MOFA in Tokyo where they put an apostile and a lot of stamps on them. which I had to do to register my marriage in Holland.

The whole international certification/authentication is a mess: I am Dutch so I wanted my marriage to be registered back home although it was not required but I was living in France at the time and now we have moved to the UK a couple of years later. For Holland we had to go to the MOFA in Tokyo, for France we had to have the documents translated by a certified translator in France and for the UK I had to have the documents translated at the Japanese embassy.

To summarize: Depending on what country you want to present the documents to, the authentication required is different. Judging from what Mariko posted, it sounds like she needs to visit the MOFA in Tokyo after fetching the documents from the City Hall of the town where her mother's koseki resides.

The birth certificate and koseki of my wife, that is. :-)

By taking my Marriage Certificate as example of a document I had authenticated, I didn't mean to confuse the subject. :-) Mariko should indeed get the koseki of her mother authenticated and forget about the marriage certificate.

On a non-related subject, I also got the following documents from the Japanese City Hall as well as the koseki: 受理証明書 / 婚姻届 Jyuri-shoumeisyo / konintodoke. These documents have probably little meaning inside Japan as the koseki is the most important document but they seem a bit closer to documents used abroad and I have heavily used all of them with the authorities outside of Japan.