Becoming Japanese

HAVENAAR Mike in Samurai Blue Mike Havenaar ( ハーフナー・マイク { HĀFUNĀ · Maiku } ) is a professional soccer player. He has represented the JFA national team in international competition as a 194cm 86kg striker at 26 years of age. He has played for many clubs, but currently he's playing for Netherland's SBV Vitesse Arnhem as a forward. “I really like Arnhem as a city, and it took just six months for me to feel at home here, but Japan is where my roots are,” Mike said to FIFA.com . "At first I had trouble acclimatizing, but since then the Dutch side in me — which I had kind of forgotten — has really come to the fore. Today I feel great, just like at home actually." He is also a naturalized Japanese national, however unlike many White naturalized people in Japan, there may be a good chance he would tell you that he couldn't tell you what it is like not to be Japanese. That is because he was born in Japan and was (passive tense) naturalized at the age of se...

Newsweek International (Asia) September 11, 2006 [ This article appeared in Newsweek International (Asia) on September 11, 2006. This slightly revised version is posted at Japan Focus on November 8, 2006. It is being republished and slightly annotated here in accordance with Japan Focus' Creative Commons license . ] By Christian Caryl and Kashiwagi Akiko A few years ago, when Milton Minoru Takahashi first set out to improve conditions for Brazilian guest workers living in Nagoya, he thought he'd be telling Japanese about soccer, samba and Brazilian beaches. They were the sales hooks the Brazilian-Japanese Takahashi—who works for a nonprofit foundation that aids the 60,000 foreigners in Nagoya—thought could open locals' eyes to the beauties of Brazilian culture. But, he says, "the Japanese didn't want to hear about those things. They wanted to talk about noise and garbage"—problems allegedly caused by the Brazilian immigrants in their neighborhoods. ...

G.W. and the Constitution Convention, 1787 This year the a project called the Comparative Constitutions Project , which was seeded with grant money from Google Ideas , along with the University of Texas, the University of Chicago, and the University College London, developed a web tool called Constitute . One of the purposes of constitute.org is to help people who draft constitutions refer to and cross-reference between the articles in the constitutions of other sovereign nations. Constitute Project Logo Constitute is a interactive digital archive that allows one to not only to read almost all of the constitutions of the world (over 175 constitutions have been digitized), but to compare and dissect them regarding what rights they offer and how they define the legislature, executive, and judicial powers of government. Some, especially Americans whose Constitution is old and Japanese whose Constitution has never been amended, may think, "how many people outside ...

From the time this site started until half a million page views later, general knowledge of Japan's naturalization has improved greatly. Thank you everyone! The amount of sites, comments, and forums that say "It is impossible to become Japanese. Japanese only let people with Japanese race/blood" be Japanese has dropped over 40% since I started tracking it, via web searches, in 2010. They don't always mention that they're reading this site, but some do. For example, another commenter will point out to someone that there information is not true and they should look at our site. When people say it's impossible to become Japanese, they often point to the data point of how there are hundreds of thousands of Koreans who have lived for generations without obtaining Japanese nationality to support their claim. Take this comment about the Koreans in Japan — known colloquially as 在日 { zainichi } (literally "Japan resident") — made by a Slashdot commenter...