Becoming Japanese

Licensed under Creative Commons Zero - CC0 terms I have run this web site, along with over a dozen other authors and contributors, since 2010. During that time, according to both my personal email, this group's email folder, and other messages and posts from social media: I have exchanges emails, interviewed, and answered questions with over 300 different English speaking people who have become legally Japanese. This includes people of most English language speaking (first or second language) countries, including many in South America, eastern Europe, Russia, India, etc. These interactions are usually questions about naturalization, life post naturalization, and include the applicant's biography and concerns about the process. I have had lunch, dinner, or just a long coffee session at a cafe, personally, with about two dozen English speaking people who have become legally Japanese, which implies a deep conversation / interview of at least 45 to 90 approximate minutes....

(Most graphs in this post are redrawn to reflect absolute numbers instead of percentages) Last year, I encouraged people who were native English speakers in living in Japan, regardless of whether they were naturalized Japanese citizens or not, to participate in a short 26 question survey run by Victoria Ferauge, an American academic expat (and political advocate relating to various nationality issues) who has lived in various parts of the world including Osaka and Versailles, France. Over six hundred (615) valid participants were tabulated from June to August of 2016, and the results were published for the University of Kent on March 24th, 2017 as part of a master's dissertation. I received permission to republish the raw data and add my interpretation here. Of the questions, the first two questions: Do you live in Japan? Are you a native speaker of English? … determined whether or not the remaining 24 questions, listed below, would apply. Disclaimer : while the ...

One dot represents about 30,000 people. Geographic distribution is artificial. Dot representative population graph derived from 2016 data from the SBJ , MoJ , JTO & JEES Look at this dot map. What do you see? No, it is not a Rorschach Inkblot Test. This is a graphical representation of the amount of "visibly foreign" (people who most people would not consider to be of the phenotype / race "east Asian" skin / hair / eye color) people in Japan in 2016. Try spotting the red and yellow dots in the map (those who can speak Japanese). Those dots statistically represent the people-of-foreign-origin or nationality that can understand Japanese — although it does not represent where they actually live. Not many of them, right? (If you're wondering why the colors I chose are hard to see, especially the brightness between gray & black and the colorblind traits of blue & yellow: that was intentional as in real life, it is not easy to differentiate ...