Relinquishing U.S. citizenship in Tokyo (part 4 of 4)

My final appointment with the U.S. embassy was with the consul Edward C. Burleson. Compared to everybody else I had dealt with up to that point, he was the most polite, most professional, quick, and to-the-point. I looked him up on the web afterwards and was impressed with his resume. Like me, he was an alumni of the JET Programme. He had spent a lot of time in Ishinomaki volunteering after the 東日本大震災 {higashi-Nihon daishinsai} (3.11 earthquake & tsunami disaster), which increased my respect for him.

During the procedure, he was politically correct almost to a fault. He gave me the option of doing the final process in Japanese, asking me if I spoke English — he knew full well, despite the color of my skin, that I could based on my personal background which was printed in front of him, showing me to have lived from birth to 22 years of age in the United States. I figured my last official act as an American should in English, so I opted for 英語 {Eigo}.

Like the rest of my U.S. Embassy in Tokyo visits, I spoke to Ed through bulletproof glass in a public room with other people. Behind him and the glass was an American flag. He asked me to raise my right hand and swear that everything I had submitted and will say is truthful and correct. That's the closest I got to an "oath". A renunciation ceremony is not necessary if you're relinquishing your citizenship.

He presented me with a completed CLN (DS-4083) and questionnaire that would be sent to the State Department. My handwritten responses were replaced with typewritten ones, and some of my responses (such as the expatriating act) were replaced with stock set phrases. In particular, the "action causing expatriation" was replaced with the stock canned phrase:

acquired Japanese nationality by naturalization on Month Date, Year with the intent of relinquishing his U.S. citizenship.

And the "evidence of such actions" was replaced with:

DS-4079 and subject's Japanese Family Register

He asked me to confirm if the newly typed version was correct and to sign both the DS-4079 and the CLN and asked for my passport book and card. He told me it would take many months before I received the CLN and cancelled passports back in the mail.

Interestingly, nobody mentioned or asked me for the CLN Personal Info Sheet (which asked me for my SSN and dates in the United States) which was given to me during my prior visit.

In the meantime, if I needed to travel to the U.S. while my U.S. passport was being processed in D.C., he proactively offered me a special letter — signed by him on embassy letterhead and embossed stamped — which said that my CLN was in progress and the Department of State was in possession of my U.S. passport. He said I might need this if a immigration officer asked why I was still technically a U.S. citizen traveling to the States but I did not have my U.S. passport. The document looked like this:



It would take me less than two months to receive my CLN and cancelled passport in the mail. The U.S. passport card had a corner cut.

In summary, my experience with doing the loss of nationality started off bad. So bad, that I was considering spending money to go to a different embassy known to have better service and more experience. However, the U.S. embassy in Tokyo experience got much better at the very end.