Why Is This Website Written in English?

Not necessarily part of a healthy diet in Japan

I first started this website for two reasons:

1. 
   The first reason was that after I naturalized, I received a lot of the same questions over and over about acquiring Japanese nationality, especially from non-Japanese, both living in Japan and living abroad. Some questions were good. Others, not so good. Some from strangers, some from people I know. Rather than re-answer the same questions over and over from people that barely passed as acquaintances, I compiled a list of as many questions, along with answers, that I could think of and referred people to this site for longer answers. I also made a list of steps that a typical applicant has to take to try to demystify the process to those that wondered if the process was systematic or arbitrary.
2. 
   The second reason I made this site was because after I had gone through the process and talked and met others who had gone through the process, I was amazed at how much outright false information and misunderstandings that was published in the English world about acquiring Japanese nationality. Not just urban folklore passed by people who don't know any better at parties or pseudo-anonymously on web forum boards, but even by professional mainstream media and journalism outlets. Often times this misinformation had an activist political social-justice motive: incorrect beliefs about naturalization would be used as supporting facts for crafting a narrative that modern Japan was intolerant and bigoted at the legal and governmental level and that this was a policy that was encoded deeply into its laws regarding nationality.

As the primary audience for the above two goals understand only English, I decided to make this site be primarily English (with some quirky exceptions).

After a few years, though, many people had come to me thanking me for site, saying they used the English site not just to aid in their comprehension of the original Japanese instructions and materials, but to understand if their process was different from the norm. I hadn't originally planned for the site to be used this way but it turned out to be a pleasant surprise. I met a lot of people who had a similar experience to me that I probably would have never met in my life had I not created the site, and I'm flattered and honored that others find the site useful for this purpose.

Not Encouraging English as a Japanese National

However, I have recently met people, both with serious and not so serious intentions, who have expressed interest in acquiring Japanese nationality whose Japanese skills were not quite at the level where they could survive, either in employment or in the Japanese-language only portion of society (>99% of Japan).

I do not encourage or recommend this.

Is it possible?

Yes. I have met hundreds of people who speak very little Japanese that seem to live fully functional lives in Japan without being able to use Japanese well enough to survive in Japanese society. I have also met hundreds of people in Japan who claim they are proficient in Japanese; many of these people actually believe they are: the Dunning-Kruger Effect is pervasive with respect to foreign language ability, even when one lives in that foreign country.

In fact, with modern technology (smartphones and Japanese-English software and the internet) and globalization and the creation of the industry surrounding learning English as an international / second / business language, it's easier and cheaper to do this now than it has ever been. In the past, you had to be wealthy or connected to a support group within Japan (expats on expense accounts in gated foreign communities, a religious organization, or a foreign military base) to do this. These days, relying on the internet to be your virtual foreign support community and connection to digital English comfort (for example, English media: television, video, movies, and two way video communication) is normal and you don't need to be in a physical community except when you crave physical contact with foreigners (which is what foreign expat dance clubs and bars in the big cities provide).

Thanks (?) to technology — both computers and cheap travel — and changing immigration policies, the "expat experience" that was once something available only to the rich, elite, and skilled is now easily obtainable by the young solo middle class person with few skills: all you need is English and a smartphone.

Is it healthy?

I am not sure. I am skeptical.

There is a long history of foreign diaspora in other countries grouping together and not assimilating during the first generation (or even the 2nd or 3rd generations) that sociologists and others have studied, and they have produced a lot of literature regarding the pros and cons of such communities.

However, with perhaps the exception of the Korean community in Japan in the 20th century and more recently, the Chinese community in Japan, there are few if any real lasting physical foreign communities that bond in the same geographic area and interact with each other socio-economically in an exclusive or semi-exclusive relationship.

In Japan (and many other places in the non-European and non-American world), these real communities (sometimes disparagingly called ghettos or barrios but sometimes given commercial and tourism friendly labels like "Little Italy" or "Chinatown") have been replaced by the "digital diaspora". Rather than being connected for the medium or long term via physical proximity and face to face interaction, many non-Japanese in Japan get their "English fix" of Hollywood media and two-way gossip and trading or hints and tips for survival almost exclusively through the net. Rather than form long term bonds with people you know have immigrated permanently, people bounce from location to location with few permanent roots.

Whether or not this, living in an English digital bubble, is a good thing for one's long term mental or emotional health or not is not known. The phenomenon is too new.

We won't know more about the long term effects of living as an "astronaut gaijin" — a foreigner in Japan that needs their English internet tether and spacesuit to assist their physical and emotional survival — for many more decades and generations.

Why Naturalizing and not Using Japanese as Your Daily Language Is a Bad Idea

When you don't use Japanese as your main language in Japan, you are effectively self-isolating yourself to the foreign community — both the very small physical community in Japan and the very large virtual community in the internet on your personal computer and smartphone, as well as the so-called "international Japanese": the Japanese who intentionally decide to live a very atypical Japan lifestyle and make a deliberate effort to occasionally interact with the foreign community in Japan. They do this either for professional advancement or self-improvement (internationalization as a self-goal or skill or healthy habit like jogging), as a "hobby" because foreign things interest them, or because they have altruistic do-gooder intentions. The population demographics of Japan mean that statistically, most Japanese people interact with English speakers not because it happens organically as part of day-to-day life. They are either forced into the situation due to work (usually a foreign corporation) or an accidental encounter on the street or in a restaurant/bar, or they are intentionally seeking out encounters for the motives described earlier.

When you naturalize, you should consider it to be a permanent action that will make it very hard (though not impossible) to emigrate anywhere else. You are stuck, for better or worse (hopefully better), in Japan.

If your primary mode of communication (either in real life or on the internet) is English, you are only able to access a very small portion of Japanese society and culture that is normally available to everybody else. Your Japan life may be limited to work and "consumption" of public and private services. Your interactions with Japanese are neither friends nor acquaintances, but rather mere encounters with weak long-lasting continuity or bonds of caring or friendship.

Somebody who lives the majority of their life in the real Japanese world can always choose to dabble or mingle in the English digital diasporia. However, one who cannot use Japanese well enough to function in Japanese-language society does not have that option: they are forced to make do with the small and not real English Bubble.

Even those who can communicate in Japanese yet choose to exist within the English Bubble in Japan often find that despite their Japanese language ability, they find it difficult to integrate into Japanese society at will because doing so requires not just the language ability, but an investment and commitment to follow through with one's Japanese relationships.

Conclusion

The reason this web site is written in English is to achieve its two primary goals (written at the beginning of this post). And I don't mind at all if people who are naturalizing, but whose Japanese language ability is not-quite-there yet, using this site as an aid or as a second opinion or as a reference to others' experiences (something you are not provided when you apply).

However, please let me be clear: while I do not condemn or insist that you have a certain Japanese language ability to naturalize, I want to make it clear that this site being written in English does not mean I think that living a primarily English language based life in Japan is the best way, or even a recommended way, to live life truly permanently (which is what naturalization is about, unlike "Permanent" Resident status) in Japan.