Becoming Japanese

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...

What? No "ceremony"? I had read on this blog that when you get your call from the Ministry of Justice about approval, the next step was getting documentation and "possibly attending a ceremony." So, when I got my call, I was excited to hear that they would be holding a ceremony and I decided to go to this once-in-a-lifetime event. I envisioned a very formal ceremony with a flag, oaths, and singing the national anthem after hearing a speech by some high-ranking official. When the man on the phone said "there will be a small ceremony, but since you have work you likely can't attend can you...?" it was a clue that it might not be the big events you see in America or Australia . Not wanting to miss such a rare event (no one else I know who has naturalized has attended one), I quickly assured him I would take a day off work and be there. He told me to bring my foreign residence card and be there before 10:00am. The next clue that it wasn'...

Naturalization, being the acquisition of Japanese nationality not from birth, has been a legal procedure in the Nationality Laws of Imperial Japan and the State of Japan. As of 2015, a total of almost 581,000 people have become legally Japanese since the fall of the shogunate and the rise of constitutional "westernized" Japan. Because being a Japanese national is defined by law (by Article 10 of both the Meiji Constitution and the modern constitution, naturalization events are recorded by law and accurate data is kept. The graph above is a visual depiction of the recorded data. Some notes: Under the Meiji Constitution's nationality law , over a period of about eighty years from 1868 to 1951, a total of only 333 people became Japanese subjects . That's an average of 4.4 people per year. Individual year statistics do not exist for the fifteen years from 1951 to 1966. During this period: 41,151 Koreans naturalized (average of 2,743/year) 4,320 Chinese naturaliz...