How did your family feel about your naturalization?

TL;DR answer: they're completely fine with what it means legally and symbolically. While all of my immediate family are U.S. citizens, my father was actually born in England and naturalized to U.S. citizenship. He has been living in North America — both Canada and the United States — since he was a child so he has no British accent. He did not keep his U.K. nationality, as the laws and politics regarding nationality were very different back in the early 20th century. So you could say I came from a family who is no stranger to the concept of changing continents and nationalities.

What they're not fine with? The fact that I (and these days, more importantly, their grandchild) are physically on the other side of the planet. They'd be perfectly fine with me taking Japanese citizenship then living in the U.S. under permanent residency. Or they'd be fine if I lived in sovereign nation of Japan as long as Japan was an island nation off the coast of the Commonwealth of Virginia — accessible via a 45-minute ferry ride.

Before the age of air travel, when a person went to another continent to find work and live there, they rarely returned back to their country. Even if they "failed" in their new adopted land; there's always hope for their children. Traveling to another country across the sea was a major event: costing a good portion of your entire life savings, it took a lot of time, and was nowhere near 100% safe.

Most people who are in Japan reading this are probably chuckling at this nostalgia from the early 19th/20th century, as most everybody that came to Japan now probably arrived via a modern, safer-than-car, airliner in cheap economy class on a non-stop route which took a little less than a day despite navigating to the opposite side of planet Earth. To those who make this journey to and from Japan for business and vacations, the Earth is small.

But if you are afraid to fly, as millions of people in the world are, the world is still a very big place, and travel to a faraway land across seas means an extremely expensive and schedule restrictive sea and land journey — or a lot of drugs if you must board a plane.

My parents are part of this group. Japan, being a country surrounded by water on the planet's opposite hemisphere, is about as inaccessible to them as Antarctica is to most of us.

If there was anything they (and by "they" or "parents" I mean my mother) were against (and I use the word "against" lightly as my mother was they were more upset than against), it was every single action I took leading up to naturalizing to Japanese citizenship:

• getting a real job in Japan
• getting a girlfriend who was really Japanese (as in not particularly wanting to live in the United States or speak English)
• having that girlfriend get upgraded to fiance status
• having that fiance get upgraded to spouse status
• raising our child in a Japanese environment
• trying to live in the United States in suburbia with the two cars and white picket fence and the "American Dream" but then returning because we were happier in Japan
• learning that our bilingual child's "dominant" language is Japanese
• having that child grow up, get a lot of educational responsibilities, followed by parents with work responsibilities, which make vacations in the "homeland" difficult — you can't stay too long due to work and school — but staying for too short of a time is also pointless because you don't want a child to be jet-lagged returning from vacation to school.
• purchasing a home (not renting) in Japan.

Naturalization, by itself, meant nothing except for putting a final symbolic nail in coffin representing "we are not going to have a pseudo-extended family like Everybody Loves Raymond where the children live within walking distance of the grandparents." Naturalization symbolically meant, "it's now official, sealed with a foreign passport: your son — and more importantly, your grandchild, live very, very far away. You're not driving. No road trips. No surprise visits."

My parents are actually proud of my naturalization, as it is an sort of symbolic proof that I've managed to make a reasonably good life in a completely new land. Like all parents, everybody likes to see, even if it's just on paper, their family members succeed. But at the same time, they're a little sad, because the permanency of naturalization also means, due to their air travel phobia and my own family's schedule, that their senior years are spent less with their descendants than they envisioned when raising me. As a parent, I can understand this.

On the bright side of things, modern 21st century technology has enabled personal contact with loved ones who live very far away much easier. I remember when I first came to Japan in the 90s, there was no real internet communication. It existed, but it was primitive, expensive, and not accessible to those who weren't early adopters and computer literate. In 1992, when you wanted to communicate with your family, you wrote letters. Why? Because international phone calls back then (both in the U.S. and especially Japan) were expensive. If you wanted to share photos, you had to take a few (usually no more than a roll of film, about 20 to 30 shots tops, so you were careful as to when and what you photographed) and be selective with who you shared because developing was not free.

You kids, you expat English speakers in Japan, with your streamed English American/British television, cable TV with foreign channels, satellite live sports, and huge selection of Blu-ray/DVD, and internet instantly connecting you with English speakers both in Japan and the rest of the world. We who came in the 90s or earlier had none of that! You know what MY generation in Japan did when we were missing a bit of our country's culture? We DRANK. That's how we got through homesickness! On the other hand, we did have beer in vending machines, which is something you young English expats probably didn't get to experience. ☺

With ubiquitous broadband internet, social networks, blogs, digital photos in the cloud, VoIP internet phone service, and free video chat and conferencing, people can communicate with their faraway children and grandchildren cheaply and easily. The internet, while not physical, helps people connect with international families.

Internet technology takes a little sting off my naturalization, which to my parents, doesn't mean a betrayal of my roots, my identity, or "my country." It simply means I'm officially" physically far away, for now and ever. I deal with this every day the best I can, for them and for my child. It's my responsibility to travel to them (ideally with my child when possible) to where they live whenever I have the opportunity because my parents can't visit me due to their pteromerhanophobia.