I thought this was a good read, but I think there are some things he minimizes. For example, he talks about increasing foreign worker visas, but only has this sentence about citizenship:
> Permanent residents are allowed to apply for Japanese citizenship after five years.
I recall reading a news article from a few years ago that said that the Japanese citizenship test is almost impossible to the point that few people try. Everything I've read about Japan has stated that the overall culture is extremely hostile to granting citizenship to non-native people, even to many mixed-race people of Japanese descent (e.g. from Brazil).
Having a culture that just says "we're happy to have you work here for a while, but you'll never really belong here" isn't really a good sign for long-term integration.
As far as I know, naturalization only involves a basic language test at around the level of N3; which should be very easy if you picked up any Japanese at all during the years spent living in the country.
The reason so few people acquire Japanese citizenship is not because of the difficulty doing so, but because it offers little in terms of tangible benefits beyond those already acquired by virtue of having permanent residency status.
1) Citizenship is needed in order to vote. Important for the health of any democracy; but in a country where it seems to be LDP all day every day anyway, immigrants can hardly be faulted much for not placing much value on this aspect.
2) For Americans, Japanese citizenship allows them to revoke their American citizenship, in order to avoid double taxation. (Not an issue for other nationalities, where the ludicrous concept of double taxation doesn't apply.)
That's about it as far as I can think of. Add to that the fact that Japan doesn't recognize dual citizenship, it's no surprise most immigrants are satisfied to just stick with permanent residency.
Note that the bar for permanent residency has been lowered in recent years, making it more easily attainable than an equivalent status in most other industrial nations.
> The reason so few people acquire Japanese citizenship is not because of the difficulty doing so, but because it offers little in terms of tangible benefits beyond those already acquired by virtue of having permanent residency status.
This. I've been in Japan for 15 years, and have permanent residency. Citizenship would basically only grant me the right to vote for (or against, I guess) the party that has been in power almost uninterrupted since the 50s. In exchange for that, I would have to give up 3 other citizenships. Not a great deal...
>In exchange for that, I would have to give up 3 other citizenships. Not a great deal...
Obligatory IANAL, but the "no dual citizenship" thing is a Japanese thing and it's not like the Japanese government will go around informing other countries of your new citizenship status. You would have to make the rounds yourself informing the governments concerned you renounced their respective citizenship.
Which is to say: I'm an American, if I went and got Japanese citizenship then the Japanese government won't care to inform the US government about the proceedings, nor will the US government care even if I personally tell them because the US government permits dual citizenship. Japan would care about my holding dual American citizenship, but again: They wouldn't care to inform their American counterparts.
> You would have to make the rounds yourself informing the governments concerned you renounced their respective citizenship.
The Japanese government requires that you have renounced your other citizenship(s) as a condition for acquiring Japanese citizenship [1, item 5, in Japanese]. I know a number of people who have taken Japanese citizenship, and they all had to go through a formal citizenship-renouncing process at the embassies of their previous countries of citizenship.
Exceptions seem to be made only in cases in which the applicant, for some reason, cannot renounce a previous citizenship.
The Japanese government, however, doesn't go around checking other countries' citizenship lists (nobody does). I know of several Japanese citizens who accrued other nationalities but never informed the japanese government. Obviously they'd be stripped of their JP rights if it emerged, but until then...
I'd expect them to ask for this only to the non-Japanese-looking, or people who acquired citizenship after birth so might be in some particular database. I have a friend who goes back to Japan fairly regularly and afaik they were never asked as such when entering with her Japanese passport.
I heard of an interesting case. A red-haired friend of mine who was born in Russia and, after living in Japan for many years, took Japanese citizenship was detained and questioned when trying to enter Canada on her Japanese passport. The Canadian immigration authorities were suspicious because she didn't look Japanese to them.
She said that she has never had any trouble entering Japan on her Japanese passport.
This is my point. Japanese people can have multiple citizenships but in order for a foreigner to gain Japanese citizenship, they must renounce at least one of their other citizenships to fulfil the "single citizenship" criteria.
So Indians are on the top of the emigration food chain and I wonder why Japan is not one of our top destinations.
There are like 50K Indians in Japan, mostly Tokyo. This is a surprisingly low number. Sure there is the language barrier but that barrier holds true for Germany also which has a lot more Indians.
My hunch is education - Japan does not have too many universities to attract young talent, as compared to Germany, Australia or the UK. I'm not sure if this is by design or if there are some other factors at play.
If Japan built a lot more universities and made it easier and relatively affordable for foreign students to sign up with English classes etc, perhaps there will be a lot more immigrants from countries such as India, Vietnam, Cambodia etc.
For Indian migrants, Japan is not nearly as attractive as the US, Canada, Australia etc. Wages particularly in engineering/IT are comparatively low, working conditions are tough, the language is difficult, and Japanese society is known for being xenophobic. Politely so, for most part, but still: you might not get beaten up, but neither nor your children will you ever be accepted as Japanese.
It's no coincidence that the biggest groups of immigrants to Japan are the Chinese and Vietnamese, who have a leg up on the language (Chinese characters for the Chinese, obviously, but Vietnamese has a lot of Chinese loans shared with Japanese too) and blend in better in terms of physical appearance and culture.
Both India and Germany have much stronger cultures of English usage than Japan -- and Australia and the UK are English speaking countries. Educated Indians learn to use English in a business setting, but this is not really as useful in Japan; and German has a lot more common with English (and with the many Indo-European languages, like Hindi and Sanskrit, that are familiar to people in India even when they are not their spoken language) than Japanese has with either language.
Japanese university entrance exams are also notoriously difficult; if it weren’t for the declining birth rate, the exams would probably be a push rather than a pull factor for students, the same way large numbers of South Korean and Chinese students try and opt out of their similarly hard exams.
> the same way large numbers of South Korean and Chinese students try and opt out of their similarly hard exams.
Chinese university entrance exams can be hard or easy, but in either case it doesn't really matter because admissions are done on a quota system. When I was looking at score data a few years ago, the threshold for being admitted to a second-tier (二本) university was around the 40th percentile, which is to say that if 55% of people in your province are better than you, you're still comfortably going to get into a university.
Individual schools may of course apply much higher thresholds (for example, there's also a first tier!), but at that point you really have to admit that the difficulty of the standardized test is irrelevant. What matters is how you score relative to everyone else. The point of the test is to have a high enough ceiling ("be difficult enough") that you can tell the difference between someone at the 99.9th percentile and someone at the much higher 99.98th. The optimal test for that purpose is infinitely difficult, but you need to balance against time requirements, testees getting demoralized and giving up, etc.
The difficulty is not necessarily just the test but its structure.
Gaokao et. al. are held once a year, if you want to retry you need to wait a full calendar year, and the single-time test covers all subjects simultaneously. To compare to SATs, those can be retaken multiple times a year, and the non-core subjects are separate, so any individual sitting is much lower stakes.
It is not exactly a secret that a big push factor for Chinese and South Korean university students is how competitive their local systems are.
> Gaokao et. al. are held once a year, if you want to retry you need to wait a full calendar year, and the single-time test covers all subjects simultaneously. To compare to SATs, those can be retaken multiple times a year, and the non-core subjects are separate, so any individual sitting is much lower stakes.
You don't get to know your gaokao score when you apply to schools.
But you do know what your score is likely to be; that's how people choose what school to apply to. It's not very difficult to predict your score in advance of taking the test.
Given that, why do we think the annual frequency makes the test "high-stakes"? The normal case is that you go in expecting a certain score and get something close to it. If you wanted to take it again the same year, you'd expect a similar score. If you wanted to spread it out over several days... you'd expect a similar score. There just isn't a large population of people who perform one way on practice gaokaos that are very similar to the real gaokao, and markedly differently on real gaokaos that are very similar to practice ones.
Student visas and work visas (the stepping stones on the path toward permanent residency) are admittedly relatively tricky. Lots of pointless bureaucracy, and requests for "guarantors". Which basically amounts to finding some random Japanese acquaintance or employer to put their signature (hanko) on a piece of paper.
Still, I expect the numbers from Asian countries to steadily increase—unless we go into some pandemic lockdown again.
Dual citizenship is kind of gray area in Japan. As long as you don't talk about it, nobody really cares. (And this attitude kind of sums japan as a whole)
Obviously: rules are rules, and in Japan rules just cannot be broken or bent.
However the level of proactive enforcement of such rules can be very variable. Dual-citizenship can be trivially hidden and nobody will hunt you down for it, particularly if you live abroad. If you bring it to the attention of some authority, though, they will be forced to take action.
1. N3 isn’t that easy. You need to learn 600 kanji, plus reading and grammar. It takes over 1000 hours of focused study [1]. It’s a stretch to call it “basic” or “very easy”.
2. There’s no double taxation for US citizens living in Japan, thanks to the foreign tax credit [2].
1. I guess it depends on the situation. I assumed N3 was very easy, because I passed N1 with ease. I don't really like to bring it up, because it sounds like bragging, but that's my experience at least. Maybe using the language in a professional context on a day to day basis helps more than I appreciate. Then again, I'd expect some degree of familiarity to form naturally if you live here as a 社会人 of sorts.
2. True, but the credit is only up to a certain amount AFAIK. And still having to file taxes to the IRS every single year sounds annoying. (But I don't know. I'm not American.)
Nothing special or insightful, but a few thoughts come to mind...
1) Having a limited vocabulary was one of the more long term challenges. What worked was simply developing a habit of consistently looking up any unknown words overheard or read. Whether jisho.org via Google or Google Translate or a dedicated app doesn't really matter. Either way the meaning should become clear within a few seconds. Don't wait. Just immediately look it up as soon as your hands are free.
Want to speed things up? Read more. Start with manga or light novels. A bit frustrating and slow going at first, but certainly effective.
2) Train your ears with random entertainment. Configure Netflix to play Japanese content as-is without subtitles. Hear something new? Immediately pause, and apply 1) above.
3) For reading kanji the same principle applies, except looking them up can be a bit more cumbersome. There are dedicated apps (phone camera -> OCR) and tools (browser extensions) out there that automatically show furigana, which can be a life saver. (I'm hazy on the details, because I haven't had a need for them for a number of years.)
BTW, I wouldn't consider any of the above to be test preparation. Just day to day habits of living your life in a foreign country. That should get you about 80~90% there.
For the final 10~20% (test prep):
1) Use a spaced repetition program such as Anki to fill any Kanji and vocab gaps remaining.
2) Buy and read a grammar text book for some of the old-fashioned/clunky expressions that you're less likely to encounter in daily life, but nonetheless show up on N1 (and N2 to some extent).
Finally: probably best not to bother learning how to handwrite kanji. Huge effort. Not much reward or need in digital times. And of course, not part of any standardized tests either.
> I recall reading a news article from a few years ago that said that the Japanese citizenship test is almost impossible to the point that few people try.
Did they substantiate this claim at all? All available public information is that the vast majority of those who try succeed.
People largely don't apply for citizenship, in part because Japan requires them to renounce other citizenships to do so, and in part because a permanent resident can do almost anything that a citizen can in practice.
I've heard the driver's license test in Japan is quite hard and fails people on the first try just to teach them humility. Maybe they were thinking of that? (whether or not it's true…)
Depends on the circumstances. If it would render you stateless, no (at least for signatories to the relevant convention). Otherwise, it's up to the country; Japan revokes permanent residence (but not citizenship) for those who have left the country permanently (after many years) or those who commit serious crimes, so that's a genuine difference (OTOH citizens can be subject to the death penalty, which I guess amounts to revocation of citizenship in a way). However if you acquired another citizenship, or failed to renounce your previous citizenships when naturalizing, then your citizenship can be revoked as a simple administrative procedure.
> the overall culture is extremely hostile to granting citizenship to non-native people
Sorry, I need to disagree with you.
The process is fairly straightforward and formal. You need to fit very few and fair formal criteria, but if you do, then there is nothing special about the process.
For a sincere applicant, there should be severe reasons why citizenship is not granted. There are statistics by nationality. I think Chinese, Korean and South Eastern nationalities are topping the statistics.
1) Have continuously lived in Japan for 5 years or more?
2) Be 20 years of age or above, and be a legal adult in my home country?
3) Be of upright conduct? [///]
4) Have a way of supporting myself and my family?
5) Be willing to give up my other nationality/ies upon acquisition of Japanese nationality?
6) Have never plotted to destroy the current government of Japan?
7) Have a Japanese skill level enough to go about daily life, and be a functioning member of Japanese society?
Note: Requirement 7 is not explicitly written in the Nationality Law of Japan, which has only 6 requirements. Nevertheless, as a prospective citizen, it is still a good idea to know the language, as it indirectly affects requirement 4 by affecting what kind of jobs you can take.
It's the classic "are you a terrorist or a member of the Nazi party" question on US entrance forms... the point is obviously not to catch those people, but being able to easily convict them of something (lying to authorities) if they emerge.
The "Japanese language requirement" is technically part of requirement 4... the rational being that if you can't understand Japanese and you aren't wealthy enough to support yourself without working for the rest of your life, you are too dependent on English language workplaces. While they exist, they are a tiny niche of Japanese society in the bigger scheme of things.
This is a common misconception. The reason you don't hear more about English-speaking westerners gaining Japanese citizenship is because they don't recognize dual citizenship. Renouncing your non-Japanese citizenships is a prerequisite to gaining Japanese citizenship, which is understandably too big a hurdle for many.
Technically, it's not a prerequisite, but a requirement. You can't renounce your old citizenship before gaining new citizenship. Japan requires you to renounce within a certain time after gaining Japanese citizenship, with a few exceptions (like Iran where you can't really renounce).
Huh? Renouncing first would make you stateless, which is against UN resolutions. I've never heard anything like this about Japan's naturalization process, just that you're required to renounce after acquiring it (and if you don't and they find out, they'll revoke your citizenship).
Many countries (including mine) allow you to renounce your citizenship but then void that renunciation if you don't acquire a new citizenship within 90 days, so as to prevent the risk of (long-term) statelessness.
The only dual nationals I know with Japanese citizenship are operating under the argument that they were born with both citizenships and the non Japanese one is legally impossible to remove by coercion. So they claim that the Japanese state is doing the coercion and don't mention it to the authorities. This would be an interesting case in international in law, but I hope it's never a problem for them.
Many countries, like mine, France, also allow to reclaim a nationality you abandoned for social reasons (marriage being the one it aims at explicitely). So you can give up your French one, take the Japanese one, then go back to France without telling Japan and ask for the French one back, it's a few forms away.
IANAL, but from my understanding of Japanese law, technically you renounce your Japanese citizenship when you acquire a foreign citizenship. So, even though Japanese authorities might not know it yet (or ever), you lose the Japanese citizenship at the very time you recover your French one.
My understanding (again, not a lawyer) it that this could have legal implications if you do something of your Japanese citizenship after reclaiming a foreign citizenship. Although apart from running and winning an election, or maybe holding a job restricted to Japanese citizens, I'm not quite sure exactly how you could get in trouble.
The loophole dual citizens (since birth) use is actually just that: since they never acquired a foreign citizenship (they are born with it), they never lost the Japanese one... so all Japan can do is order them to make unspecified efforts to renounce their foreign citizenship. Looking it up on the internet and concluding it's complicated seems to count as "efforts".
If Japan catches you, however, that's an automatic loss of Japanese citizenship. Japan has a specific law that says if you voluntarily acquire (or re-acquire; it doesn't distinguish) a foreign citizenship as an adult you immediately lose your Japanese citizenship.
And if you lose your Japanese citizenship, you go back to being a foreigner. Without a visa. Meaning you risk losing your ability to live and work in Japan.
As most people who naturalize do so because they've established deep for-life roots in Japan, their Japanese citizenship is not something they're willing to gamble.
People who were born with dual citizenship because of their parentage are a special case. They're supposed to make a choice by age 22 IIRC, but in reality you're allowed to defer it for a while because you're "considering it". So people in this situation just keep doing this indefinitely. Not really legal, but it's not really enforced much AFAICT.
For someone who gained JP citizenship through naturalization, it's a different matter. From what I've read, they will check to make sure you renounced your old citizenship, and will revoke your new JP citizenship if you don't (which probably also means no visa eligibility).
Is Japan any different from the USA in that respect?
From what I've heard it goes like this: British person applies for US citizenship. He has to "renounce" his British citizenship and hand over his British passport to the US authorities, who shred it. The next day he goes to the British embassy, tells them what has happened and asks for a new passport. The British authorities give him a new passport and, of course, they don't say anything to the US authorities.
(There might be different cases to consider here, depending on how you acquired your British citizenship. As I understand it, if you were born in the UK of British parents then you have a right to a British passport regardless of how old you are, where you have lived, and what other passports you've had. It's not possible to "renounce" that right. It might be different for someone who acquired British citizenship in some other way: perhaps some people could "renounce" their citizenship.)
>U.S. law does not mention dual nationality or require a person to choose one nationality or another. A U.S. citizen may naturalize in a foreign state without any risk to his or her U.S. citizenship
Thanks for the correction! What I'd heard on several occasions in face-to-face conversation seems to be inaccurate. I wonder where the inaccurate story came from: a different country, a long time ago, or totally made up?
I know some people with citizenship. All it requires is fluent Japanese. They came from a d̶e̶v̶e̶l̶o̶p̶e̶d̶ developing country so getting citizenship was an almost no brainer for them. There's no real complicated test, it' just that the whole process is done in Japanese so you'll have to fill out paperwork and do interviews in Japanese.
>Having a culture that just says "we're happy to have you work here for a while, but you'll never really belong here" isn't really a good sign for long-term integration.
For a lot of people this isn't really a big issue. Having a small group of close friends matters way more for people. If anything, it can feel like a relief to not have to be held to such a high standard where you start to lose your identity.
Well, it kinda sucked when they wouldn’t let the permanent residents into the country during the first year of COVID, so you were essentially unable to visit family (or worse, unable to return to your life, home and work after such a visit).
Who the heck downvotes this and think it's normal for person LIVING in country for years not being allowed to return to their home and family, just because they don't live there long enough to gain citizenship yet? It's extremely xenophobic/racist approach (which should not really come as surprise in Japan).
I’d be one thing if I hadn’t lived here long enough to get citizenship yet, but after 10 years?!
Like, it’s clear whoever wrote that law didn’t deliberately exclude foreign residents, he just didn’t consider them a thing at all. Like ‘Japanese Nationals’ should comprehensively cover everyone in Japan.
There's a popular Japanese streamer who had a whole mental breakdown character arc since she was studying abroad in Australia and couldn't go home for a year or two because they wouldn't let her back in if she did.
And being in Melbourne she couldn't leave the house for some of that either.
If you score enough points on the HSP visa (you don't even have to get that visa, just look at the point scoring), you can apply for PR in 3 years (70 points) or 1 year (80 points). Anyone on this forum probably can easily score at least 70 points just be getting a decent tech job in Japan.
Don't be so dramatic, it's not that bad. If you're Indian, for instance, it's really easy: you just need to wait on a waiting list for 180 years. How is that not welcoming and easy?
> I recall reading a news article from a few years ago that said that the Japanese citizenship test is almost impossible to the point that few people try.
I did a quick search and as far as I can tell there is no Japanese citizenship test. There is a test of Japanese language skills but even that is not described as a high bar. Maybe this has also changed?
> Having a culture that just says "we're happy to have you work here for a while, but you'll never really belong here" isn't really a good sign for long-term integration.
It depends on what living on a visa acually means in practice. Under what circumstances can you lose your visa? If it can happen overnight if you lose your job (like the H-1B in USA) that is bad. On the other hand, if renewal is pretty much guaranteed until retirement age unless you did a crime, that's perfectly fine.
Losing your job on a HSP visa means you need to find a new job in 3 months. For a regular work visa, there's no such requirement; you have until the visa expires, whenever that is (which could be less than 3 months, or much more). The regular work visa is also not tied to an employer (HSP is though).
It's not nearly as bad as the US. And yes, from what I've heard, renewal is pretty much guaranteed unless you badly fuck up somehow.
> For a regular work visa, there's no such requirement; you have until the visa expires
That's wrong. The same rules apply. After 3 months immigration can (but is not required to) force you to leave the country. Both for HSP and e.g. specialist visa types.
For a regular work visa the requirement to engage in activities appropriate to your status of residence can be covered by job seeking etc., whereas for HSP (i) there is no way to satisfy it except working for the specified employer.
> Permanent residents are allowed to apply for Japanese citizenship after five years.
Is it really strange though? It's same in Czechia, first you must hold temporary residency for at least 5 years before gaining permanent residency, then after 5 years of permanent residency you can apply for Czech citizenship, so it takes minimum 10 years to apply for Czech citizenship, by then most foreigners who moved here are already gone.
My understanding is that the Colombian citizenship test is quite hard too.
I don't think one can meaningfully use the difficulty of a citizenship test as a data point in an argument with zero contextualization. How hard exactly is it compared to the test your average country has in place? Maybe no such survey exists but
> Permanent residents are allowed to apply for Japanese citizenship after five years.
I recall reading a news article from a few years ago that said that the Japanese citizenship test is almost impossible to the point that few people try. Everything I've read about Japan has stated that the overall culture is extremely hostile to granting citizenship to non-native people, even to many mixed-race people of Japanese descent (e.g. from Brazil).
Having a culture that just says "we're happy to have you work here for a while, but you'll never really belong here" isn't really a good sign for long-term integration.