Recently a friend of mine came up against a common problem for foreigners. This friend, who happens to be a columnist for this esteemed publication, and whom for the purposes of this piece I'll call Andre, tried to purchase some volumes from a popular online literature vendor based in the United States. In order to receive his package, the bookseller informed him, he requires a Personal Customs Code from the Korea Customs Service. His quest to obtain this code led to one of the difficulties that living in Korea as a non-citizen can pose: how to write your name.

It sounds like a silly problem, almost farcical. Surely everyone can write their own name? And yet on myriad websites and phone apps daily, foreign folk try in vain to input their legally registered labels in order to register for a service, join a club, activate a mobile phone or even order a free pizza. Often, a pop-up will announce, coldly, "The inputted name does not match the registration number," or, even worse, "This is not [your] correct name."

Falling victim to this glitch is not a result of an inability to speak Korean. I consider myself to be fairly Korean-competent, but I too have found myself angrily shouting at the computer screen after being told that Jacco Zwetsloot is not my real name.

The key here is one's alien registration card (ARC). This document is obligatory for all non-Korean citizens residing in Korea on anything other than a tourist visa (Americans here under the Status of Forces Agreement, however, are exempted). Foreigners use the ARC just as Koreans do their nationally issued ID cards, for everything from proving identity at the bank (more on that later), to opening an account with a phone company and registering for online shopping. One's name as printed on this card becomes one's only legal name in Korea, and is connected to the 13-digit alien registration number. If a mistake is made in entering either of them into a website, it can lead to endlessly repeated requests to try again.

Although both Koreans and foreigners have registration numbers, it used to be the case some years ago that certain websites were not equipped to handle a foreigner's number. In all cases, the first six digits before the hyphen show one's birthdate, in the format YYMMDD. The first digit in the second batch (after the hyphen) is determined by gender and the century of one's birth. Numbers 5 and 7 are for foreign males; 6 and 8 are for foreign females. Foreigners' numbers were incompatible with checksum routines on some websites, so it was impossible to, for example, buy a movie ticket online or use certain home shopping services. Although this is less the case nowadays, entering one's name is still tricky. Here is what I have learned from trial and error:

1) You must write in all capitals (as on your Alien Registration Card);

2) You must write your name in exactly the same order as it appears on the ARC (if your surname comes first on the card, that's how you write it);

3) You must enter all components of your name, even if, for example, you have middle name(s) that you don't usually use;

If this doesn't work, try the next step:

4) Omit spaces, writing your name as one very long word (the website where one obtains a personal customs code works this way, at least for this author);

If your name is so long that it runs over two lines on your registration card, and the Korea Immigration Service has split one component of your name into two with a hyphen, try this step:

5) Include the hyphen in the spelling of your name (as happened to me when buying a new mobile phone).

Banks are a more complex story. I have accounts at two banks, and both compelled me to register not only my legal name as printed on my ARC, but an unaesthetic hangeul-ization thereof. It is this version that appears on my passbook and other documents. When I fill in a bank form, that is how I must write it. And yet when proving my identity, tellers still ask to see my ARC, on which my moniker only appears in Roman letters.

Recently, I received a package by courier; on it a sticker offered a free pizza. I went to the website as directed and tried to fill in my details, to be told that only names written in hangeul were applicable. I tried writing my name in Korean, but it didn't help. Only legally registered names as printed on ID cards would be accepted. No free pizza for me.

It would make things a lot easier if foreigners were allowed to register legal aliases. Such an alias could be a two-to-four character name in Hangeul, registered with the government, and usable on official documentation. I have used a Korean name for the last 15 years, but banks and so on won't accept it as a legal alias. In Japan, there is such a system. Long-term resident Korean citizens, some of whom have been there for generations, benefit by using a Japanese name as an alias, without having to give up the Korean name bestowed by their parents. Such a system would perhaps be helpful here. Not just for free pizza.



Jacco Zwetsloot is Director of Business Innovation at Hwang Mok Park, a Korean law firm. His email address is jacco@hmplaw.com.