Becoming Japanese

The Application Paperwork, in multiple copies. Each envelope is one full set. From 2014 to 2016, when I went through the process of naturalisation, I wrote a whole series of articles about it on my blog . One of those articles was an account of my naturalisation interview, in March 2015, which I wrote on the evening of the interview. Everyone's interview is different (if you are single, for example, your spouse won't be involved), but people nervously waiting for their interview may be interested to see what it was like for me, so I am reposting the account here. I went to the 法務局 { Hōmukyoku } (Legal Affairs Office) in Kawasaki, and my wife, Yuriko, met me there (we were both going from work). I arrived a bit early, but my case worker soon came to speak to me. First, she took all my application documents off me, and took them into the Nationality Consultation Room to look through them. That took her about twenty minutes, while I waited. Yuriko arrived just after she ...

These two men became Japanese subjects during the Empire and popularized American jazz from the Philippines. Raymond Conde is one of the most famous Filipinos to have ever immigrated to Japan. He is known as being one of the many to bring and develop jazz music within Japan, introducing both American styles and influencing Japanese styles of the genre. Jazz, invented by Americans, was introduced to the Philippines by American colonizers as early as 1898, which marked the end of the Spanish-American War, the declaration of independence by Emilio Aguinaldo, and the non-recognition of that declaration by the United States, which believed they acquired the Philippine Islands via the Treaty of Paris in 1783. The new American colonizers, primarily Black American soldiers, would bring both their harmonicas and their jazz culture to Manila. By the 1920s American occupiers would bring gramophones and jazz records from the States and play them in music halls and clubs. This imported cul...

55% of weddings in Japan are "western" style (2014) Often times, when people learn that I have Japanese nationality, they ask me, "are you married to a Japanese?" When I answer yes, they often say, "oh, that's why," perhaps concluding in their head that it was marriage that enabled me to obtain Japanese nationality. However, many are then surprised to learn that marriage neither leads to automatic conferral of nationality nor is it necessary in order to get Japanese citizenship. Many unmarried people in Japan have an easier time naturalizing than they do acquiring their so-called "permanent" resident status ( 永住者資格 { eijūsha shikaku } ) for their residency in Japan. Historically†, there have been three ways to obtain nationality "automatically", or involuntarily, in the world: by where you were born ( jus soli ; 出生地主義 { shusshōchi shugi } ) by the nationality of your parents ( jus sanguinis ; 血統主義 { kettō shugi }) by ...

A Eurasian ハーフ { hāfu } (mixed race), some say she resembles Anne Hathaway ( アン・ハサウェイ { An · HASAWEI } ). Not long after it was discovered that Japan's The Democratic Party 's Renho ( 村田蓮舫 { MURATA Renhō } ), born with Taiwanese ROC nationality but later acquired Japanese nationality at the age of 18 due to the 1985 nationality law change , had failed to legally renounce her foreign nationalities, people discovered that another member of the House of Councillors, Kimi Onoda ( 小野田紀美 { ONODA Kimi } ), had failed to complete her Declaration of Choice by legally relinquishing her U.S. nationality after making her Declaration choosing Japanese nationality. Kimi Onoda was born in Chicago, Illinois, to an American father and a Japanese mother, in 1982. Her family returned to Japan, where she did all of her compulsory schooling and high school education in Setouchi City, Okayama Prefecture ( 岡山県瀬戸内市 { Okayama-ken Setouchi-shi } ) before moving to Tokyo and graduating f...

licensed from iStock Japan has a procedure called 国籍選択 { kokuseki sentaku } (Choice of Nationality). It was created with the revision of the Japanese nationality laws to address the issue of involuntary multiple nationality acquisition by Japanese — usually those who are minors that received citizenship from a new world country in the Americas such as the United States via jus soli (nationality based on where you were born, sometimes called "birthright nationality"): Japanese-Americans and Japanese-Canadians, for example. However, it can also apply in other circumstances, such as if you acquire another nationality involuntarily (meaning, you did not directly apply for it or naturalize) — such as through marriage to a person from a country that does not separate nationality with marriage (called jus matrimonii ) or religion. It can also happen when somebody acquired citizenship after birth due to the revision in the Japan Nationality Law in 1985 that allowed people to...