Becoming Japanese

When people learn I'm a Japanese national , they naturally (and correctly) first assume, from my very non-Japanese appearance and because I speak Japanese with a slight non-native accent, that I was neither born nor grew up here. South Park creators parodied the Native American / Japanese conspiracy theory in " Cannibal! The Musical " So their follow-up question and assumption is often about how or "why" I am Japanese. Laughably, I have had many people ask if I was ハーフ { hāfu } (mixed race) , even though there is absolutely no DNA affecting my phenotype that should give people that idea. U.S. Senator Elizabeth Warren is probably more Native American than I am Asian. They ask this question because most Japanese and non-Japanese have met people who don't appear to be Japanese yet are, and the most common explanation is that their in Japanese ancestry in their lineage. There actually are Japanese people who were born in Japan, grew up complete...

It's been brought to my attention that the previous post (which was originally published first on Quora, then edited and posted here ) is apparently popular enough that some kind translator, Jerome Cohen , took it upon himself to translate it into French for better availability to non-English readers. I thank him for making this popular post available to a wider audience. Please do check out his French translations of other questions about Japan and Japanese from his Quora profile as well as the Quora in French page on Facebook . Je suis en fait une personne qui a fait cela (je suis devenu légalement japonais). La réponse courte est que vous pouvez avoir le nom que vous voulez, avec quatre conditions: Il doit être écrit exclusivement en, ou une combinaison de, hiragana (moderne, pas archaïque), katakana, ou kanji. Tout comme vous ne pouvez pas écrire un nom sur des documents officiels américains en thaïlandais, cyrillique, hangul ou arabe... ou même utiliser des signes ...

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...

credit: Ann Swinderman The December 9th, 2017 article published in the Japan Times' national news section , written by Philip Brasor , is titled with the bold alarming proclamation that: Without an official father, kids can be stateless [in Japan] Is this really true? With the semantics word "can", this is pedantically true, although in reality, many other, much more rarer conditions must also (fail to) be met. Although arguably not an ideal situation, there are countless children born in Japan who receive Japanese nationality at birth even without an official or known father. To be born without a nationality in Japan, many more conditions must not be met (such as, and arguably much more important, like the existence of a birth certificate). What IS true is that when neither jus sanguinis nor jus soli can be used to determine a child's origins, then it is possible that a child may not acquire Japanese nationality immediately at birth. The author of the a...

A Eurasian ハーフ { hāfu } (mixed race), some say she resembles Anne Hathaway ( アン・ハサウェイ { An · HASAWEI } ). Not long after it was discovered that Japan's The Democratic Party 's Renho ( 村田蓮舫 { MURATA Renhō } ), born with Taiwanese ROC nationality but later acquired Japanese nationality at the age of 18 due to the 1985 nationality law change , had failed to legally renounce her foreign nationalities, people discovered that another member of the House of Councillors, Kimi Onoda ( 小野田紀美 { ONODA Kimi } ), had failed to complete her Declaration of Choice by legally relinquishing her U.S. nationality after making her Declaration choosing Japanese nationality. Kimi Onoda was born in Chicago, Illinois, to an American father and a Japanese mother, in 1982. Her family returned to Japan, where she did all of her compulsory schooling and high school education in Setouchi City, Okayama Prefecture ( 岡山県瀬戸内市 { Okayama-ken Setouchi-shi } ) before moving to Tokyo and graduating f...

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'...

Japan and the U.S. have no exact equivalent Part of the steps involving collecting all the paperwork for one's naturalization application to Japan involves getting "proof" of your current nationalities. You would think that this would be as simple as presenting your current, valid, passports . The problem is mainly this: a passport does indeed indicate what country (one of them, at least) you were a national of, that information was true only at the time of the application for the passport. Passports often last at least five years (such as the Japanese "blue" passport), and more often, ten (10) years (such as the Japanese "red" passport) . It's very possible that one could have lost that citizenship from the time the passport was issued. And while if you lose one's nationality/citizenship countries almost always cancel the passport — sometimes this is only done digitally in databases if the country cannot get access to the actual passpo...

I was reading the English Wikipedia entry for the Japanese Nationality Law under the section of Naturalization (which apparently was originally written by a young student as part of an assignment) and came across an interesting bit: For many years naturalized citizens were required to adopt a Japanese family name¹. The Ministry of Justice determined in July 1983 that naturalizing citizens were no longer required to adopt Japanese names. As of that time most naturalizing citizens were Koreans². A well-known example of someone who did not adopt a Japanese name is Masayoshi Son, the wealthiest man in Japan as of 2007, who naturalized using his Korean family name rather than the Japanese family name he used during his youth³. I was curious as to where it got this information, so I looked at the sources. There were three, all English: The Boston Globe: " In Japan, Koreans still feel sting of discrimination " by Charles A. Radin (July 29, 1994) Hoover Press: " Japan D...