Becoming Japanese

There are very few naturalized Japanese citizens who are also good English bloggers and contributors, so we're always pleased when somebody volunteers to contribute their knowledge and experience to this blog. Turning-japanese.info would like to welcome 千田 健二 { CHIDA Kenji } (Kenji Chida) as a contributor to this site. Kenji is from the United States and first emigrated to Japan in 1998. He naturalized to Japanese in 2004. Despite having read a lot about his experiences, I was never able to track him down for the site. Fortunately, he found us and began commenting on some of our blog posts. As you may have noticed from the Authors page on this site, people who naturalize to Japanese are not only from all sorts of countries, but they live not just in the city but all over Japan and have very different lifestyles from each other. Kenji has already written about his experiences regarding naturalizing and living long term in Japan in the following articles: Intervi...

Japanese Alien Registration Card 明けましておめでとうございます！ { akemashite omedetō gozaimasu! } (Happy New Year!) As this is New Year, I figured I'd start off by answering very simple, yet still good and often asked questions. Do you need to be legally Japanese — as in "have Japanese citizenship?" No. That's way, way down the road and something you do after having lived in Japan for a very long time and you want to be here forever. It's not even necessary for living in Japan forever if you do want the rights or responsibilities it has or you don't qualify. But you do need to be legal to live and work in Japan. For almost everybody but a few special cases that are beyond the scope of this blog/site, this means working or living either full or just part time or temporarily on a fixed length contract as a legal visitor/tourist on one or more fifteen (15) day or ninety (90) day (depending on the country) "temporary landing permit" status(es) — which...

素民喜 琢磨 { SUMINKI Takuma } (Takuma Sminkey) is both a Japanese citizen and a new contibuter to this blog and web site! He first came to Japan in August 1990 and was officially naturalized on December 14, 2010. He has lived three years in Kagoshima, six years in Miyazaki, four more years in Kagoshima, and the rest in Okinawa — I wish to visit all of these places someday. Before Japan, he lived in the U.S. in Maryland — close to where I was born and grew up: the D.C. metro area. Currently, he's a professor at a university. Like me, he's interested in running. He's been contributing via comments for some time, and he's also contributed a lot of the documentation and forms to this site (especially the Microsoft Word versions). Some of his observations regarding naturalizing as an American were a bit different from mine, even though we naturalized at pretty much the same time. We look forward to him sharing his advice, experiences, and wisdom. よろしくお願いします！ { Yo...