Becoming Japanese

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...

South Korea is so high it needs a separate scale: see yellow / right side I met a gentleman who was referred to me a few days ago by a friend. While I get this a lot from those who are interested in naturalization, his situation was a first for me: he was a native Japanese who had naturalized to United States citizenship . In doing so, he renounced his Japanese citizenship . However, life circumstances (returning back to Japan and he doesn't wish to be hooked into two tax systems) meant he now wishes to re-acquire Japanese nationality and relinquish his U.S. nationality along with his Japanese national wife's U.S. LPR status. This means he will have relinquished/renounced two nationalities in his lifetime. That's very unusual, but it made me wonder: but how often do people give up their other nationalities? The general answer is: with the exception of South Korea, not very often. Even the highest number of renunciations (excluding the ROK , this would be the USA ) ma...