Do foreigners need to change their name to a Japanese name when they become Japanese citizens?
You can have any name you want, and it can be as long as you want , providing four conditions: None of these characters are allowed in a Japanese 戸籍 { koseki } (family register). It has to be written exclusively in or a combination of ( modern, not archaic ) hiragana, katakana , or kanji . Just like you can’t write a name on American official documents in Thai, Cyrillic, Hangul, or Arabic … or even use diacritic marks used in European languages ( ex. the German sharp S [“ß”] or French cedilla [ç] or others [ÂÄÅÀÁ]) — people becoming American must adapt their name to the plain 26 character alphabet — you have to adapt your name to Japan’s writing system. Because there is not a perfect one-to-one correspondence between either Japanese language "spelling" or pronunciation and other languages, most non-Japanese names will need to be adapted or modified for the new writing system. "Adrian" for example would become 「エイドリアン」 which when literally converted t...