profiles of Naturalized Japanese politicians

There's a great article that I recommend reading in the Metropolis Magazine entitled "Poll Position". It's also been picked up and republished by the site Japan Today.

The Dharma/daruma doll, pictured here, is a good luck charm where one colors an eye to make a wish, and when the wish comes true, you color the other eye. They are a staple of Japanese political campaigns.

Normally, the eyes are colored black. Given that the profiled politicians here are Caucasian, I thought the photo of a blue-eyed daruma (which is actually the color chosen for the eyes by upper house Councillor, }弦念 丸呈 {ツルネン マルテイ (Marutei TSURUNEN), for his campaign daruma dolls.

The other two politicians covered are }茨城県つくば市 {Ibaraki-ken Tsukuba-shi (Ibaraki Prefecture Tsukuba City) Councilman }ヘイズ・ジョン {HEIZU · Jon (Jon HEESE) and }愛知県犬山市 {Aichi-ken Inuyama-shi (Aichi Prefecture Inuyama City) Councilman }ビアンキ アンソニー {BIANKI Ansonī (Anthony BIANCHI). Ibaraki Prefecture may sound far, but there's actually a special express train that travels from Tōkyō station directly to Tsukuba and back, and I have a chance to meet and see Jon often inside Tōkyō.

It should be noted that these three politicians are not the first foreign-born or originally-foreign-nationality politicians that have been elected by the Japanese people. Born and raised in Japan, but technically originally-foreign then naturalized, }村田 蓮舫 {MURATA Renhō ("Renhō") — a popular member of the House of Councilors — was originally Taiwanese by nationality (born }謝 蓮舫 {XIÈ Lián-fǎng).

Anyway, at the bottom of the article is a postscript box/checklist titled "Turning Japanese", which obviously got our attention ☺. For the most part, the advice is correct in spirit, although for each of the conditions it mentions, there are exceptions and details which we can understand it doesn't cover in the name of brevity.

There are, however, two point items in the article that border on "misinformation" that this site would like to address:

Get married

The easiest way to expedite the process is to marry a Japanese national. You will have a much harder time becoming a Japanese citizen if you don’t.

While this is true for permanent residency, this is not true at all for naturalization. It is true that being married for many years may qualify you for }簡易帰化 {kan'i kika (simplified naturalization), but all that means is the years of residency requirement is lowered from five years (to three or one). To qualify for this simplification, you need to be married for many years anyway, so the years of residency saved vs the years of marriage required cancel each other out, so the net time required difference is probably negligible in the bigger scheme of things.

For more information, consult our previous post entitled, "which is easier, permanent residency or naturalization?"

Pick a name

If you’ve always wanted a cool kanji name, this is your chance. In the old days, you had to pick from a limited group of standardized names, but now you can choose your own characters. You can even write your name with katakana if you prefer.

This got the Japan Today community  into a bit of an uproar over, many believing that it was an attempt at erasing one's identity. First of all, there was never a "limited group of standardized names" in the old days that you had to pick from. The author is probably confusing the fact that in the eighties, the case worker would strongly recommend a name that would allow for easy acceptance (as in easy to remember, spell, and pronounce if you're Japanese). The power of a catchy, easy-to-remember, easy-to-pronounce name is well known in all societies, and case workers of the time sometimes encouraged this too strongly. They no longer do this.

Japan, like most other countries of the world, has standardized alphabets which foreign names must be transliterated into. When a person that has a Greek, Arabic, Korean, or Chinese names immigrates to the U.S., they cannot use their real "international" name on U.S. identification. They must convert their name to the plain 26-character English alphabet. Even Europeans must often remove diacritics above vowels. French must remove the diaeresis & cedilla and expand ligatures; Spanish must change the letter eñe to 'n', Germans must convert the sharp s (ß) ligature to "ss".

Likewise, when becoming Japanese, you can keep your original name if you wish, but you do need to decide on an official way to write it using the "alphabet(s) of the land", which is }仮名 {kana and }漢字 {kanji. As usual, when converting one's name into a foreign alphabet, some sounds and meanings and nuances are changed or lost.

This official alphabet requirement does not actually extend to Japanese passports (which contains a }ローマ字 {rōmaji (Latin letter) 26-character alphabet transliteration of one's Japanese name). Depending on the connection your name has to other sources, it may be written in its original spelling, and alternate names may be written beside the real name in parenthesis.

More information on names in Japanese from this site can be found here:

• Do you have to take a Japanese name if you naturalize?
• Can I have an official Japanese name even if I don't naturalize?
• No More Kanji or Kana Aliases for Non-Japanese

Overall, despite the above, it's a good article though, and I'd recommend reading it.