Becoming Japanese

O Canada! Canada is the most recent country to pass legislation which allows it to remove its (Canadian) citizenship from people with more than one nationality. The legislation, bill C-24, passed June 11th of this year (2015), is called the "Strengthening Canadian Citizenship Act". It's a broad bill, covering many portions of Canadian nationality. For example, one of the things it does is make it a little harder to become Canadian by naturalization. For example, you must now spend a total of 365 × 4 (=1,460 or four years; three with permanent resident status and be physically present in the Dominion of Canada for 183 days [about 6 months]) total days in Canada. The previous law required 365 × 3 (= 1,095 or three years; two with permanent resident status) days in Canada. Bill C-24 also made easier to give Canadian citizenship to some people who thought they were legally Canadian but discovered they weren't: such as those born out of wedlock many decades ago or th...

♪ Bad girls, bad girls Whatcha gonna do, whatcha gonna do When they come for you ♪ Hopefully, very few people plan to get into trouble with the law, either in Japan or overseas, after they naturalize. After all, in order to naturalize in the first place, your record (even for driving offenses), including immigration record, needs to be almost flawless . Both inside Japan and outside of Japan . However, the real meaning of becoming legally Japanese isn't about speaking or acting Japanese or even living in Japan forever (it's perfectly possibly to gain Japanese nationality then live as a Japanese expat elsewhere in the world). Naturalizing and becoming Japanese is about establishing a legal permanent link between you and the sovereign state of Japan. When the Constitution of Japan says "sovereign power resides with the people" ( 『主権が国民に存すること』 { "shuken ga kokumin ni son suru koto" } ) in the preamble, by "people" — a constitutional law term ...

Edward Joeseph Snowden did live & work in Japan Edward Snowden, a contractor for the NSA who worked for Booz Allen Hamilton , has been in the news for the past month and is currently a fugitive from the U.S. law hiding in the transit zone of a Sheremetyevo International Airport in Moscow. He has been looking for a way to leave this area and go to a country where he won't be able to be tried or punished for the crimes that the U.S. government alleges he committed. Standard operating practice for people who flee from the law of their country by going overseas is to freeze/cancel their passports (which does not cancel your citizenship/nationality) so that the only place you can travel to is back to the country that you're a national of (in Snowden's case, back to the United States, into the waiting hands of prosecutors). The problem with applying for asylum for political crimes is the prerequisite of  having to be physically present in that country to apply f...