Turning Japanese

When I boarded the plane at Heathrow back in July 1999, I knew I was leaving Britain for good. And now it's official. On February 17th 2006 my British Citizenship ceased to be, and on 4th April, I became a Japanese Citizen by permission of the Minister of Justice Seiken Sugiura. Here's the story of how I stopped being one of you, and started being one of us.

As is fairly common knowledge, the first requirement for any foreign national considering taking citizenship is that they must be resident in Japan for a minimum of five consecutive years. My five year mark came around the summer of 2004, whereupon I started to consider quite seriously the possibility of taking the plunge. The ideas mostly came up as disjointed fragments, such as when I was applying for a visa extension, how nice it would be if I had a Japanese passport and could skip the whole ordeal. These fragments came and went however, and never really formed into a distinct plan until one Hanamaguri-kun, a new face at BD, started to speak about his own application for citizenship and subsequent acceptance. Although I was openly quite critical of his motives, his explanations crystallised my own thoughts on the matter, and in a literal moment of enlightenment, I woke up one morning and it just made complete sense that citizenship was the only way forward. By coincidence, this was exactly 10 years after a similar moment of enlightenment, whereby I woke up knowing I should move to Japan.

• Convenience
       No more visa hassles, no more re-entry permits, no alien registration card to carry, free access to the job market etc.
  
  
• Legitimacy
       Full legal identity via koseki (family register), name appears in rightful place on juminhyo (residency certificate) etc.
  
  
• Security
       No fears of deportation, fuller legal protection, voting privilege etc.
  
  
• Warm fuzzy feeling
       A sense of being an insider, as opposed to a half-arsed fence sitter.

If I had to choose, I'd probably put the "warm fuzzy feeling" category at the top of the importance chart, for the same reasons that most people get married. Sometimes a sheet of paper is more than just a sheet of paper, and living out the rest of my days as an outsider just felt… wrong, somehow.

Then of course I had to consider the negative aspects. As far as I could see, there were two significant reasons why I should just keep things as they are. Those were, again in no particular order:

1. The necessity of giving up my former nationality. EU passports open a lot of doors and are considered quite desirable, so this took serious consideration. In Japan however, an EU passport is next to useless, so ultimately it wasn't a difficult decision. I just have to remember to join the longer queue next time I'm entering Britain.
   
2. An excruciatingly intrusive and drawn out application process. More on that later…
   

At this stage, what I would now refer to as the wrong end of the excruciatingly intrusive and drawn out application procedure, I was still formulating a plan, and decided it might be time to have a chat with Mr Hanamaguri-kun. He was kind enough to fill me in on many of the specifics of the procedure, and despite some aspects making my eyes bleed, I felt I was well forewarned of what was to come. I also figured it might be an idea to make my intentions known to certain people who may care or object. Parents and friends offered no objection, so all was good to go. Present date: mid-October 2004.

A quick search on the internet got me the phone number of my nearest Legal Affairs Bureau in Kudan, and a short call later I had an appointment for an initial "chat" the next morning at 10. As the main Tokyo office, I would have thought they'd been busier, but then I guess it is a fairly unusual procedure. The chat was to be the first of many, and involved sitting in a cubicle with bureau staff outlining my background (country, parentage, siblings, marriage status etc.) and eligibility. The eligibility criteria was basically 5 years of residency, functional use of Japanese (no official test required), some kind of financial security (ability to work or family ties), and no history of violent uprising against the Japanese government. They were quite specific on this last point. For homework, I was required to obtain 2 copies (with A4 translations) of my birth certificate, my brother's birth certificate, parents' marriage certificate, a note from my mum confirming I was the product of her marriage to my dad, my university graduation certificate and the ex-wife's koseki. It took about 1 month to get these documents sorted and translated.

On the next visit, I submitted these, and once they were all approved, I was given instructions to provide the MAIN documentation. Most of these were in pre-printed sheets that needed to be filled in, but there was still a fair amount of shopping required at.

From memory, these were as follows:

• Naturalisation application form + photo.
• Family relations form detailing who I'm related to and where they can be contacted, their thoughts on what I'm doing etc.
• Personal history form - birth to now, every address, school, workplace, violent uprising against the Japanese government, and any other major life events to be detailed.
• Finances form - income, monthly expenses, debts, bank balances etc. with photocopies of bank book pages.
• Proof of employment (letter from boss), taxes paid (from ward office), residence (housing contract) etc.
• Paper alien registration certificate expanded to include all addresses for the past five years.
• Addresses and maps to all addresses and workplaces for the past 5 years.
• Photocopies of every passport page including blank ones.
• An essay, handwritten, on "why I want citizenship."
• Two photographs of me with Japanese people (really!)

And I got off lightly. Many of the forms to be filled out simply didn't apply to my situation, so I got to skip those ones.

This took another few months to prepare, with the essay proving to be particularly confounding. The real killer though was on the comparatively simple naturalisation application form itself - that was where I would have to specify the name that I would take once citizenship is granted. A katakana rendering of my former name would have been acceptable to them, but it seemed a bit crap to me and a sorry burden on any future offspring, so I opted for kanji. However, after literally months of trying to decide one I was coming up blank. At the last minute, I filled in the best name I could come up with, but regretted doing so right up until July, six months later, when a friend suggested a much better one. It took a couple of phone calls and some extra paperwork to change it, but I'm glad now I did… So I submitted the remainder of the paperwork, which was approved, and I was sent off to await further contact.

Further contact came late in March, where I was ordered back to the bureau (now my fourth visit) for an official interview by the officer in charge of my case. He was a fairly pleasant chap and asked pretty simple questions such as my motivations for naturalising, and what kind of lifestyle I lead. I avoided using words like "alcoholic" and it was all pretty unthreatening. Later that day he dropped by the house to check the contents of my fridge. This too was not the cause of any problems as I'd been careful to clear out all the old beer cans and wine bottles earlier, but he wouldn't give any feedback at the time other than to say that every twitch was going in his report and he'd get back to me in a few months.

A few months later, July if I recall, he did just that. As the application is in its final stage, it is required that I renounce my former citizenship and provide proof to the MOJ that this has been done, he told me. This stage was news to me, as I'd always gathered that once citizenship was granted, you had a 2 year grace period to renounce at your leisure (or forget at own risk). It would appear though that as with exchanging driving licences, special rules apply to Geneva Convention signatories. Geneva gives with one hand and takes away with the other it appears. So, I contacted the British Embassy who sent me a form to fill in and send back with 150 UKP and a full birth certificate. Interestingly enough, the guidebook that accompanied the form stated in very clear terms that anybody renouncing their citizenship in order to take citizenship of another country **may reapply for the renunciation to be nullified once the new citizenship has been secured**, should one so desire. I do not desire, but it's a handy safety net should Japan sink into the sea, be burned to a crisp by volcanic lava, turn into a giant boxer and get knocked out by another country sized boxer, or any other fate wished upon Japan by Korean elementary school students in response to a minor territorial dispute concerning a couple of uninhabitable rocks in the middle of the Japan Sea. Additionally, the initial renunciation automatically expires after 6 months if another country has not laid claim to my being, so filling out and sending off the form did not cause any major headaches.

The waiting period for that form to get stamped and returned to me was another matter altogether. It had be sent to the Home Office in Croydon to be stamped, and could take as much as 3 months, they told me. It in fact took 7 months. 7 months of endless phone calls, letters, emails, faxes and personal visits to the embassy and Home Office trying to find out what the hell was going on, before I eventually received the certificate mid-March 2006. I had a professional translator acquaintance knock up a quick Japanese version, and I dropped it off at the Legal Affairs Bureau that same evening.

3 weeks later, on 5th April, I was contacted by the Bureau on my mobile phone and told my application had been approved the day before and that I was to drop in at 11:00 the morning of the 13th to pick up the certification. The news was delivered so nonchalantly that it took most of the length of the call for me to work out that there wasn't in fact some minor problem with the application requiring my urgent attention. I felt a little like I'd been robbed of the "overjoyed" or "stunned" reaction I was led to believe I would experience. Nonetheless, I headed for the bureau on the 13th as requested, and the event took the form of a mini-ceremony where myself and about 25 others were called up by our new names one by one to take our certificates, and a very short speech about being good citizens and things. It kind of reminded me of my graduation ceremony from university, where I was naturally already fully aware of the result beforehand, but it wasn't until that moment when my name got called that I got to feel pride in what I'd achieved. I don't know why I opted to wear a suit that morning, but I felt very glad I did.

With certificate in hand, it remained only for me to visit the local ward office to cancel my alien registration and register for a new koseki as a Japanese citizen, which I completed later that day. The end.

Epilogue

At the time of writing (late April) it's hard to tell what's changed really. I'm still in the process of informing the various services and accounts of the name change, but I have to continue to use my old name at work to avoid confusion (recently married people who take their partners' surnames are given a similar treatment). My driving licence will continue to show my old name and nationality on the front face until renewal in two years, and I have no need for a passport in the immediate future. In fact the only times I really get to notice that anything's different is when I visit the ward office to pick up paperwork - the staff invariably try to point me towards alien registration, and have a lot of trouble accepting my story that I'm not actually a foreigner. An easy mistake I'm sure. Even the police skirted over the whole absence of alien registration card when I got pulled over the day before I had the licence updated, and merely took me at my word that I had conveniently naturalised the week before. Perhaps if they'd been a bit more suspicious it would all seem more real… But a lot has changed, even if I can't see the whole picture just yet, and I expect it to become increasingly evident as time goes on. In hindsight, I'm sure it was worth it. Yup!

May 17, 2006