Becoming Japanese

The Japanese Constitution begins "We, the Japanese people," The Japanese Constitution uses the word "people" a lot in the official English translation where the official Japanese version says 国民 { kokumin } (Japanese national). I've heard conspiracy theories on the Internet that claimed that this was Japan's sneaky way of changing the Constitution from the unaware Occupying Forces who had a significant hand in designing and writing the Constitution by basing it on various Constitutions and legal documents of the world. (When Japan made its first Meiji Constitution, it also evaluated existing overseas supreme laws to craft its own first Constitution) To make things more confusing, the Japanese language version of the Constitution occasionally translates "people" or "all people" more closely to 何人 { nanbito } (everyone). Generally speaking, the high courts of Japan consider the Japanese language version of the Japanese Constitut...