Becoming Japanese

My nationality giveaway: 名刺 { meishi } One odd thing I've noticed on the English-speaking internet that talks about Japan is there's an awful lot of speculation out there as to how naturalized Japanese (especially those who don't "look Japanese", like me) are "perceived" by natural-born Japanese (especially those who "look Japanese"). To me, the funny thing is the people who are most cynical about the ability for an immigrant to be accepted by society have usually never met anybody who is naturalized to ask them about their opinion, and they've probably never met a natural-born Japanese who has dealt with a naturalized person before. Nevertheless, this doesn't stop them from forming an opinion on it. They form this opinion from what they've read on the internet: taking negative experiences (or experienced) from other foreigners who have lived or worked in Japan for various lengths of time and extrapolating those experience...

Yes, yet another "List Post" So your dreams have come true and are close to realizing your dream of living in Japan permanently and becoming a national of the country! A country that speaks, reads, and writes Japanese... Before you came to Japan, you may have had a few years of "college Japanese" under your belt, or you're starting with a blank slate. Either way, here are some things that me or another long-timer I know has either done or wished they had done from day one in Japan. A lot of these things were not immediately obvious when I first started learning Japanese and living in Japan over two decades ago. I hope they can help you. This post is actually a re-post from a old now defunct blog I wrote called "Nippon: Until Death Do Us Part". It was a relatively popular post. I thought I'd never cover topics such as Japanese language learning on this blog/site, but as this article dealt with learning Japanese for long term life in Japan, a...