CircleCount helps you better understand Google+

2013-05-01 15:01:23 (0 comments, 0 reshares, 1 +1s)

On a separate note, I find it amazing that the U.S. IRS is pushing other countries around and demanding that overseas financial institutions violate their privacy policies by providing records on Americans using their services (FATCA).

2013-05-01 07:10:34 (1 comments, 0 reshares, 2 +1s)

The name of our site isn't "Becoming legally Swiss", but I found this case of a long term American becoming a long term citizen of another country equally fascinating.

2013-04-25 03:11:23 (0 comments, 0 reshares, 0 +1s)

Cyprus has recently provided a "fast track" path to citizenship for "wealthy investors." However, even Cypus' nationality cannot be bought with money alone. Many other requirements, including residency, exist.

2013-04-24 12:51:41 (0 comments, 0 reshares, 2 +1s)

In the 2½ Oyaji Video I did on Youtube, I think I'm (REALLY) Turning Japanese With Eido Inoue (How to become a Japanese citizen) , +Hiko Saemon , +Victor Boggio and I talked a bit about teenagers talking to us about wanting to go to Japan and live there forever even though they had never been to Japan (sometimes never to another country).

While I still stick by my statement that you should wait until your older and settled down before you make such a drastic move, for exceptional cases, there are ways to become Japanese even though you're not an adult and were not born Japanese.

2013-04-23 12:13:47 (10 comments, 0 reshares, 0 +1s)

Personally, I'd prefer having fingerprints stored (locally) inside my passport as it's a better form of bio-identification than a color photo as faces and hair styles age and change.

2013-04-22 12:13:57 (1 comments, 0 reshares, 0 +1s)

Perhaps they'll correct the other errors in three more years. ☺

2013-04-20 03:24:15 (1 comments, 0 reshares, 2 +1s)

Many people do not know that you don't immediately receive a family register when you naturalize. You get a special "breeder" document that you must submit to your local office within one month. Hat tip to
+神酒九龍 for the extra paperwork.

2013-04-19 01:30:13 (0 comments, 0 reshares, 2 +1s)

Starting today, the comments from this Google+ page and the site www.turning-japanese.info will be linked because the website is switching from using Blogger's commenting system to Google+'s commenting system.

2013-04-17 16:32:37 (0 comments, 0 reshares, 2 +1s)

I really need to work on my voice. I hate hearing myself speak recorded.
+Hiko Saemon +Victor Boggio

2013-04-17 08:01:25 (1 comments, 0 reshares, 2 +1s)

I wonder how many people from native-English speaking countries have naturalized to the People's Republic of China?

It looks like this person is staying and living in the special administrative region of Hong Kong while possessing a PRC passport. Interesting.

2013-04-15 04:16:00 (0 comments, 0 reshares, 0 +1s)

Longtime Japan residents, +Hiko Saemon and +Victor Boggio, will be interviewing me, +Eido INOUE , about the web site http://www.turning-japanese.info/ and how it came about and why I naturalized this Wednesday evening, Japan Standard Time (22:30+0900).

The show will be live, but you will be able to view a recording afterwards.

Feel free to watch if you're interested!

2013-04-08 08:10:35 (1 comments, 0 reshares, 0 +1s)

This is a fun little interactive web page were you can click on the countries on the left (for emigration) or the countries on the right (for immigration) and get a pretty visual graph that allows you to see the immigration and emigration patterns.

If you click in the center you get an overall summary.

2013-04-07 02:04:25 (0 comments, 0 reshares, 1 +1s)

Last year, I singled out this website's page on Japanese naturalization as having some of the worst misinformation on the internet: http://www.turning-japanese.info/2010/07/misinformation-justlandedru-japanese.html

It seems they have finally listened to the comments (they ignored my comments and feedback, but they had to listen when they switched to the Facebook commenting system I guess) and corrected most of the errors.

They still left in the misinformation about home inspections, though.

2013-04-06 15:32:54 (0 comments, 0 reshares, 0 +1s)

I read a question on another forum asking whether it was easier to apply for Permanent Residency at some Immigration Bureaus than others. With PR, I'm not so sure. But with naturalization, all of the packets are sent to Tokyo for approval so I don't think it makes much of a difference in the end.

2013-04-06 07:32:28 (0 comments, 0 reshares, 1 +1s)

Getting my driver's license renewed was a personal milestone for me: my driver's license was the last piece of current official identification that contained my old name on it. The only thing left with my old name on it is my birth certificate and my legal change-of-name court order.

2013-04-02 05:48:22 (0 comments, 0 reshares, 2 +1s)

I know this sounds vain and narcissistic, but I wonder if the Tokyo Embassy changed some of their pages on making an appointment for reporting a loss of nationality after they found or noticed my pages describing the difficulty I had with it?

2013-04-01 13:21:19 (0 comments, 1 reshares, 1 +1s)

Watching a thread on forum.gaijinpot.com prompted me to write this. A person who claimed that once you're rejected it's almost impossible to get accepted in the future, so he decided to defer because he wasn't a regular employee and thus his living condition wasn't considered to be sufficient.

2013-04-01 07:30:27 (2 comments, 0 reshares, 1 +1s)

Germany's immigration policies, nationality laws, and assimilation challenges look a lot like Japan.

2013-03-29 07:50:12 (0 comments, 0 reshares, 0 +1s)

Reading the Official Gazette (官報) to due internal stats for the Becoming legally Japanese website (statistics on the names, ages, and locations of naturalization people), I was surprised to see a SHA-1 hash signature in hexadecimal published in the vertical document.

2013-03-25 09:04:07 (2 comments, 0 reshares, 3 +1s)

Having an artist specializing in 家紋 (kamon; "family crest") design one for me for a formal portrait I need to take in a Japanese kimono.

Since I'm naturalized, I don't have a crest of my own. Traditionally, one takes the family crest and/or sometimes adapts or modifies it slightly. Mine will derive from my in-laws crest and combine elements representing my heritage/upbringing (D.C. and/or America), as the crest will be associated with my new 戸籍 (koseki; family register) which has my family on it; my wife and daughter will use it on their formal Japanese attire.

There is no legal protection or registry for Japanese crests, unless they are trademarks (such as the Mitsubishi logo or the crest on the Kikkoman Soy Sauce bottles), or it is the Japanese imperial crest (which is the "national emblem" or the Prime Minister's crest.

2013-03-14 13:38:51 (1 comments, 0 reshares, 1 +1s)

I attempted to add a bonus section in here about British subjects vs British citizens. After reading the official text on U.K. government websites, my head started to hurt (so many types of citizens in the former British empire!).

Then I read what British people thought on the web. Turns out, most of them don't know what they are either.

So I gave up. The answer for Japanese nationals is much easier.

2013-03-13 13:10:04 (2 comments, 0 reshares, 1 +1s)

Saw a blog post about jus sanguinis today that kept saying "by blood". Some of the commenters jumped to the conclusion of "by race", so I decided to blog this.

2013-03-10 01:46:18 (0 comments, 1 reshares, 0 +1s)

A little background about how the "Quarterly Publication of Individuals, Who Have Chosen to Expatriate" list in the U.S. Federal Register (the daily journal of the U.S. government) came into existence, and why those changing their nationality don't show up in it.

2013-03-09 02:30:30 (0 comments, 0 reshares, 0 +1s)

Google+ kept pestering me to update the Cover for this page, so I just did.

2013-03-09 02:19:01 (1 comments, 0 reshares, 2 +1s)

The original mission and reason I started the site Becoming legally Japanese was to make a lot of information that was previously only in Japanese available to English speakers who had misconceptions or questions about the process. It never occurred to me originally that it would be used as a recruitment tool or aid to people choosing to do it.

However, along with this person, I've had at three native English speaking/reading people tell me this year that they became Japanese, and they used or referenced our site at one time or another.

I'm glad they found it useful!

2013-02-22 12:49:50 (1 comments, 0 reshares, 1 +1s)

For my PR application and many of my later Japanese visas, I was able to "self-sponsor" myself. For naturalization, you de facto sponsor yourself. You don't need a nice letter from your college advisor about how you'd make a great Japanese citizen.

2013-02-21 14:59:09 (0 comments, 0 reshares, 2 +1s)

A person in the middle of applying got scared when he read a warning on a Japanese bulletin board about losing his pensions.

Don't believe everything you read on the internet. ☺

2013-02-20 10:59:17 (0 comments, 0 reshares, 1 +1s)

A small writeup about the very interesting last two paragraphs of Martin Fackler's NYT obit.

2013-02-19 12:09:46 (0 comments, 0 reshares, 1 +1s)

Sometimes people write to me and tell me how they want to be legally Japanese but were outside of the country too long to make the physical residency requirement. They get depressed when they find out they "reset the clock" by being out of the country too long.

On the other hand, these people have valid visas (or even permanent residency). They have their whole lives to get it, so they will eventually qualify.

2013-02-17 04:17:13 (1 comments, 1 reshares, 2 +1s)

FYI regarding the accusations concerning status of the main site <http://www.turning-japanese.info/>'s administrator and author's naturalization status.

2013-02-17 04:09:29 (0 comments, 0 reshares, 1 +1s)

A Happy 50th Birthday wish to Tsukuba "Science" City Councilman +Jon Heese , who celebrated with many (MANY) of his closest friends and family at Dining+Café Elegance, following by partying way, way too late at a bar and night club he used to own.

As it's well known that both he and I are naturalized, and many of his friends are long time non-Japanese residents with often decades of Japanese residence, I received a lot (over three people, which for English speakers naturalizing to Japan, counts as "a lot") of questions from people interested in possibly naturalizing, which I found to be very surprising.

2013-01-26 03:16:15 (2 comments, 0 reshares, 1 +1s)

I have a flag of Japanese National Flag (国旗) pin label on my bag that I carry with me that was a gift I got when I naturalized. Sometimes non-Japanese will see it and make a comment, but the other night on the subway an elderly woman behind me kept saying 「日の丸！日の丸」 ("Rising Sun! Rising Sun!") in a soft & quiet but excited voice.

She was in her high seventies at the least.

2013-01-14 13:15:23 (1 comments, 0 reshares, 0 +1s)

Answered a reader's mail that asked for a little more personal info regarding the particular's of my name and how I chose it. This seems to be the most common question asked to our site. Anecdotally, people seem to be more excited, at a personal level, about having a legal Japanese name than any other aspect of naturalized Japanese citizenship.

2013-01-13 03:14:28 (0 comments, 0 reshares, 0 +1s)

I ran into a snafu regarding the length of names last week. Not my name, but my parents names. My parents names are on my koseki (family register), transliterated from their Latin passport names to katakana (Japanese syllabet). Including their middle names, they're quite long.

When filling out on online HR form asking for the names of my immediate family and whether they're living with me or not, the server refused the verbatim entry of either of my parent's names, saying it had to be 10 characters or less in either script (only English and Japanese were accepted).

By removing their middle names, I was able to input their names in katakana exactly as they are on my family register.

2013-01-13 00:56:29 (1 comments, 0 reshares, 1 +1s)

I've read on the net about it takes years, sometimes decades, to do the naturalization process. In reality, it takes nowhere near that long – usually about a half a year. And these days, it's faster than ever thanks to ministry directives to make it easier to obtain citizenship and permanent residency.

2013-01-03 11:21:13 (1 comments, 0 reshares, 0 +1s)

Well, that's an unusual way to get citizenship.

In case you were wondering, nobody becomes Japanese to reduce their tax obligations (unless you're American and your income is complicated & high enough that the double-taxation situation gets you on a technicality).

The taxes in Japan, by the way, are not bad. For most people, they're slightly more demanding than the United States, but far less than most European Union states and Canada.

2012-12-22 11:27:47 (3 comments, 0 reshares, 0 +1s)

Once you have enough miles/status, the cabin attendants look at your name and nationality (and deduce your language from your nationality rather than race) and address you by your name and your country's national language (if possible), rather than guessing. Even if you're in economy class.

JAL does this for those at Sapphire status and above. It depends on the airline and their service protocols. The head flight attendant usually addresses me by name prior to or just after takeoff. "Itsumo oseiwa ni natte orimasu, Inoue-sama."

2012-12-21 16:05:31 (0 comments, 0 reshares, 1 +1s)

Asked at Immigration: "Are you a military baby?" That's a first. Friendly guy though. He did ask if I still had a U.S. passport after asking where I was born.

2012-12-14 05:24:25 (8 comments, 0 reshares, 0 +1s)

When I have some time to code I will actually made the quiz form submit to a web app that checks the answers and keeps track of the statistics.

2012-12-10 01:28:15 (1 comments, 1 reshares, 1 +1s)

My voting ticket for the big election on the 16th arrived a couple days ago. After carefully considering all the issues, the platforms, and their characters, I think I'm going to vote for Tomomi Itano representing the K-team.

Oh wait, she's not running for national office? Well then, the choice is now much harder.

2012-12-08 20:02:21 (0 comments, 0 reshares, 0 +1s)

I still need to go through the older Google docs that got mangled (such as the Naturalization Handbook) when raw HTML editing ability was lost and clean them up, but the Docs page has been greatly improved.

2012-12-08 22:10:01 (0 comments, 0 reshares, 0 +1s)

Interesting experience today flying home to Japan in international executive class on a JAL 767. Most of the time, while you fly, cabin crew "guess" your ethnicity / language from your appearance. If you look Caucasian, they say "Welcome Aboard." If you appear to be Asian/Japanese, they say "Irasshaimase."

For executive class in smaller jumbos, though, the crew checks your name and nationality on a manifest roster before speaking to you. I'm very white, so I was surprised when the flight attendant (and a trainee) introduced herself and interacted with me on the flight not only via my name (Inoue), but also speaking to me in Japanese.

Even more surprising, in mid-flight (long ten hour flight), she made small talk and asked how long I had been naturalized (she had to guess that; that's not on the roster).

2012-11-29 18:51:34 (3 comments, 3 reshares, 2 +1s)

SCOOP! I went to the public library yesterday and combed through the Diet's Official Gazette for hours to find out whether a big point in this book was true or not.

2012-11-29 08:12:20 (0 comments, 0 reshares, 0 +1s)

A reader asks, "After reading your website, however, I could not find answers to our question: Can the whole family get Japanese citizenship, ie., including our 2 children ... ? We would like to have our children get the Japanese citizenship too, otherwise we foresee a great deal of trouble ahead when travelling overseas, but have seen almost no information online about naturalization for minors."

2012-11-28 03:52:46 (0 comments, 0 reshares, 0 +1s)

Thanks to Joe Jones for the tip about the PRC from a frequent flyer forum.

2012-11-28 03:10:22 (0 comments, 0 reshares, 0 +1s)

Updated this entry to reflect that U.S. citizens who naturalize to other citizenships do not renounce their U.S. citizenship. They voluntarily  _relinquish_ their U.S. citizenship. There's a difference: relinquishing is a free (but still complicated) process. Renouncing is no longer free.

2012-11-24 03:35:52 (0 comments, 0 reshares, 0 +1s)

Watching an episode now in Osaka where the topic is:

「サインの遺言書」（ティーアップ）
アメリカ人で、日本人の女性と結婚し、日本に帰化している男性から遺言書を書いたので見てほしいと言われた。自筆で書かれているが、押印がなく、サインが書かれている。この遺言書は認められるか？

"A signed [not stamped/sealed] testament" (Tee up)
An American marries a Japanese woman. The man who naturalized to a Japanese citizen asks me to look at the will/testament he wrote. While it is in his handwriting, it is signed with a signature, rather than a Japanese-style seal/stamp. Should this will/testament be recognized?

2012-11-05 01:02:36 (3 comments, 0 reshares, 1 +1s)

I generally tell people that "being accepted by the Japanese" has very little to do with naturalization. There are people who are accepted as part of various communities who are non-Japanese, and there are Japanese, either by birth or naturalized, who are not accepted by various communities in Japan. Every community has different acceptance criteria. More than anything, the ability to communicate continuously and comfortably in the Japanese language is the number one criteria for acceptance into most communities (a "community" being a work circle, a PTA group, the dad's team at a public school, etc).

The second most important criteria for acceptance into many communities/groups in Japan is a belief in your perseverance  and commitment to staying in that community (which includes living in Japan). Most non-Japanese and Japanese know that few non-Japanese stay within aco... more »

2012-11-03 01:52:07 (6 comments, 0 reshares, 0 +1s)

This week, leaving South Korea immigration, the officer inspecting my Japanese passport pointed at the photo, then (Caucasian) me, smiled/smirked and said something in Korean which I didn't understand. Other than that, the event was uneventful. Entering the country, I was asked nothing.

I'm guessing he said something like "that's the first time I've seen this before."

2012-09-17 12:16:56 (0 comments, 0 reshares, 1 +1s)

I wonder if I should write a book about naturalization to Japanese in English?