# My tattered passport

- Author: Joichi Ito
- Date: 2004-12-24T11:54:27Z


I stupidly got a 10 year passport (instead of a 5 year) which is now approaching the final year in its life. It has become reasonably tattered. In particular, there is a corner of the passport cover just where the row of OCR characters starts. This corner is also the closest to my picture. It started as a minor peel. However, several immigration officers have picked at it trying to see if it was a fake (making it worse). Each time a brutal agent swipes it through the OCR scanner, it gets a little worse. I figure a little bit of glue would help protect this corner of my passport, but I wonder if putting glue on my passport to mend a tattered corner is some sort of crime... I googled around and couldn't find anything. All I found was an article about a Chinese woman who was thrown in jail for trying to enter the US with a tattered passport. Yikes!The OregonianIn their latest outrage, they jailed a Chinese businesswoman, whose misfortune -- and only crime -- was to arrive at the Portland International Airport with a tattered passport.

Portland immigration inspectors deemed Guo Liming's passport "suspicious." They forced her to strip to her underwear, searched her, interrogated her, handcuffed her for transport to The Dalles and jailed her for two nights -- before concluding [how inconvenient for them] that her passport was valid.The problem is, getting a replacement passport in Japan requires giving up the one you have for a period longer than I am able to be in Japan for awhile.

Does anyone know anything about whether it would be dumb to try to put glue on my passport and if not, what sort of glue I should use? Basically, the corner is peeling into 3 layers. The cover, the paper and the lamination inside...





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