Published in the Gazette after Naturalizing

The 官報 {kampō} (Official Gazette) is an official government newsletter which is published by the National Printing Bureau. It has been in existence in various forms since 1883.

As all citizens have a right to read the Official Gazette to know what their government is doing, the Japanese government put the Gazette online starting in 1999. The electronic versions of the Official Gazette is at the following address: kanpou.npb.go.jp.

The government publishes all decisions and actions relating to the Japanese Constitution, Imperial edicts, laws, cabinet orders, treaties, ministerial ordinances, and notices in it. Naturalized citizens aren't the only individuals that get singled out in the Gazette; any person, foreign or not, that does business with the government in an official capacity gets mentioned. Also, Japanese who die overseas while travelling are also mentioned (!). So are people who renounce their Japanese nationality. Naturalization permission is given from a very high level of the government (directly from the Ministry of Justice, rather than a sub-organization like immigration), and every order it gives related to individuals, not limited to naturalization, is published.

Many other governments in the world do the same thing. The United States does as well as a matter of public record, but at a lower level, because naturalization is handled at the State court level, not the Federal level — so they don't publish the list in the equivalent Congressional Quarterly (and if they did, the list would be too long).

The forms that are online are in signed PDF form, so if you print them out they are identical in layout and size to the original A4 pages.

Regarding the names in the Quarterly:

• Registered Chinese names will be listed in their original 漢字 {kanji} (sinograms), but they will be converted to 新字体 {shin-jitai} (new Japanese simplification) forms if the glyph isn't exactly the same. There will be no space between the family name and the given name.
  
  All other names will be the original passport Latin name converted to カタカナ {katakana} (Japanese syllabet). Differing from how names are listed on the 戸籍 {koseki} (family register), all names will be separated by a 中黒 {nakaguro} (middle full-width dot), rather than just a western-style comma between the family and given names, with no spaces. (ex. last⋅first⋅middle)
• The new names people have chosen after naturalizing are not listed. However, if your new Japanese name is not different from your pre-Japanese name when transliterated to Japanese, or you changed your name to Japanese prior to naturalizing, your new name will be effectively listed.
• The addresses that people lived at at the time of application in Japan are listed.
• The birth dates of the applicants are listed.
• While there are search engines designed to search the PDFs (such as kanpoo.jp), the nature of the PDFs and the long list of names means they cannot search for individual names or addresses of the naturalized. The layout of the 官報 {kanpō} (Official Gazette) is traditional newspaper format, with many narrow columns where the majority of the text runs top-down, right-left. The nature of the large naturalized data list means that for presentation convenience (for the printed version), the data is turned sideways, and the associated left-to-right top-to-bottom text is not converted into meta-data within the PDF that can be processed, and doing OCR (optical character recognition) on Japanese is still an inexact manual labor intensive science, thus most search engines can't index this data (yet).
  
  In order to do a text search of naturalized people or search for editions older than a few months, you need to go to a public library where they have special database connections. If you need to search for a name prior to 1989, you need to go the the National Diet Library and look for it on microfilm or paper.

To find your recently published name in the Gazette from your home internet connection, look up the date the 法務省 {hōmushō} (Ministry of Justice) officially granted your naturalization permission, then search the various Gazette publications from that date to about a week ahead (normally it takes a few days for the names to be published). You can speed the process up by searching for the keyword 『帰化』 {"kika"} ("naturalized") to find the section within each Gazette. But from there the search is manual. It is not in any sorted order. Other than names and addresses and birth dates, no other data (ex. former nationality, prefecture where naturalized, new name, registered domicile) is included.