Becoming Japanese

People that naturalize to become U.S. citizens must pass a U.S. citizenship test to become legally American. There are lots of web sites that teach you how to pass it. For Japan, there is no quiz. The only thing that comes close is the need to be able to speak and read Japanese during the interviews with the case workers. Technically speaking, it's part of the requirement that you can demonstrate that you have the skills to provide for your livelihood in Japan. If your Japanese language skills are weak, they may actually ask you to take a small quiz demonstrating that you have the Japanese literacy (as in Japanese sinogram and syllabet recognition and recall) ability of a primary/elementary school student in the third (3rd) grade. However, unlike the U.S. Citizenship Test for naturalization — which can be taken in languages other than English for certain applicants — your interviews will not have any sort of questions testing your knowledge of Japanese civics or history. A...

Three AKB48 members encourage Tokyo citizens to vote. Yes, they're old enough to vote. This month, on December 16th, Japan will be holding a major election for various seats due to 野田佳彦総理大臣 { NODA Yoshihiko sōridaijin } (Prime Minister Yoshihiko NODA) dissolving the lower house (House of Representatives, or 衆議院 { shūgiin } ). Additionally, Tokyoites will vote for a new governor. It's a very important election, as there are major issues surrounding the debt crisis & raising the consumption tax, free trade liberalization with the TPP , foreign affairs & sovereign territory disputes, energy policy & nuclear power, and a potential shift in representation for the majority party (currently 民主党 { minshutō } } — the Democratic Party of Japan — which has no relation to the political party of the same name in the United States) as well as the governor of Tokyo, who presides over an area that has a larger population and GDP than many countries in the world. How does ...

When we first started putting up scanned paper forms in our Docs page a few years ago, it was possible to make Google Docs based text files using raw HTML , which allowed us to do some pretty advanced formatting for many of the naturalization application forms that we wanted to distribute (which aren't easily available from other sources). Using web browser friendly HTML made sense at the time for two reasons: it allowed accessibility from mobile devices that didn't have word processor programs, and it allowed the text in the documents to be easily searchable from the web. Times have changed, though, so we're changing with it. We've completely redone the Docs page , adding Adobe PDF and Microsoft Word documents for many of the forms (and we will continue to add more). We've even added some documents that weren't there before (such as the Korean applicant samples from the てびキ { tebiki } (Handbook). We've also linked many of the documents to correspo...