Becoming a Naturalized Citizen of Japan

Three years ago I cancelled my American citizenship and became a naturalized citizen of Japan. Here is how I did it:

1. I googled and emailed a lawyer. You do not need a lawyer. The entire process is entirely doable as an individual and will be cheaper by about 150,000 yen ($1.5k), but this way at least one of us would know what was going on. I also read that it might help make it look like you're taking it seriously.

The picture is of the packet of information he gave me after we first met and we went through what I specifically would be needing (ex: not married so I wouldn't need a marriage certificate). The number 085 is because these pictures were taken at City Hall. I essentially walked up, showed them the packet and said "Help!" They got me everything they could at the time and explained what I would need to do to get the things that they couldn't yet.

Q: Hey I notice the packet is bilingual. Do you not need to speak Japanese to naturalize?
A: It might vary. My lawyer told me about a person he represented once who could not speak/write/read the Japanese language at all, and after his first interview with officials they asked him if maybe he couldn't learn a bit of the language first. He went to a language school for six months, applied again and succeeded. I heard you can interview three times, and if you fail all three times you have to start the application process over from square one.

2. Second meeting with the lawyer, a list of what we would need at our upcoming meeting with officials.
A "Yes this person lives here" certificate from city hall, bank statements, pension paperwork, a statement from my mother stating I am her daughter (we had different last names), a hand-written essay stating my reason for wanting to naturalize, my birth certificate, mother's marriage certificate, documentation about my international comings and goings, pictures of myself with my family(?), a hand-drawn map of my neighborhood and another hand-drawn map to my workplace from the nearest train station.

Q: Hand-drawn map of your/your workplace's neighborhood?
Yes. Depending on the way your city does things, officials may or may not visit your workplace and/or home. According to my lawyer, officials in Tokyo are too busy with all the people who apply for naturalization so they rarely, if ever, make personal visits. But I was naturalizing in Saitama, and no one naturalizes in Saitama, so officials there have a lot more free time. They did not visit my workplace, but they did call up and talk to one of my coworkers, asking if I worked there and that sort of thing. Thankfully it was a coworker I liked very much.
But they did visit my house. I had an assigned advisor from city hall, and he came with a lady coworker. She quite shamelessly looked into the bathroom and up into the loft, and then we drank tea and gossiped about my ex boyfriends. I could do a whole post on that visit, but the important thing is they wandered the neighborhood--back and forth from the station--for over an hour and went to many of the houses in the area around my apartment, showing my picture to the local old ladies and asking them about me. Thankfully all the local old ladies were the most amazing old ladies you ever did meet and later they told me they gave me a glowing review as a positive contribution to the neighborhood.

3. The essay. It was a requirement to be hand-written. This is my first draft--hence all the little boxes I wrote in to help make my terrible, awful, no good, very bad handwriting just a little more legible.
The most interesting thing about the essay was the different degrees of support I received from the people around me. My Korean senpai told me that I shouldn't ask people to proof-read or make any alterations that anyone recommends--I should just submit it 100% raw, as my own personal best. When I told a coworker about it, she offered to rewrite it for me from scratch. When I told a friend about it, she pointed out that she is a licensed calligraphy teacher and as such she would be happy to claim that I love Japanese culture so much that she has been teaching me calligraphy for years. I didn't take either of them up on their offers, but you can bet they're both two of my favorite people to this day. I only hope I can be that supportive for someone someday.

Q: What does the essay have to be about?
A: Why you want to naturalize. I don't know if there are any resources around these days, but when I was looking to the internet for help 3 years ago all I found were blogs of others who had completed the naturalization process who refused to say anything more than "It is extremely personal. You just have to write why."

This is my lawyer, directly before one of our meetings with officials at City Hall. He was wonderful and we still exchange New Years Greeting Cards to this day.

Fun fact: This is the same format that Japanese resumes are written in.
In this case this was not only a history of my work experience and education experience, but it went all the way back beyond elementary school to when and where I was born. The document on the right is a sample explaining how it needs to be filled out.

A small personal detour: I legally do not have a father, so that actually cut down on some of the paperwork for me. The main official who handled my case was really cool about it and didn't mention anything more than "Well families come in all shapes", but if I remember correctly there was one official at my final interview who said "Your mother doesn't know who it is !?" The look my main advisor gave him could have killed. The most difficult paperwork to assemble was getting my grandmother's death certificate, I believe.

Q: So how long did this all take?
A: Almost exactly a year from the date I first submitted my application until the date I received the phone call congratulating me on my new citizenship (it was Friday the 13th of October).

Q: Did you think you had it in the bag from the start?
A: The one thing that made both my lawyer and my assigned advisor from city hall nervous was my traffic violations. You have to submit five years worth of your traffic record, and if mine had been clean I probably would have been a shoe-in, but I had one violation from five years prior (turned right in a U-turn only lane in Shinjuku--Tokyo driving is rough stuff) and a speeding ticket from a year after that (Hokkaido has some absolutely huge roads, and police don't have a whole lot to do, so speed traps are everywhere.)
When I got the phone call saying I was in, the conversation actually started with my advisor asking me if I'd had any new traffic violations in the year since I'd applied. I hadn't, he followed up with "Well then congratulations, you've been accepted for naturalization." If I'd been refused for the traffic violations, I would have had to wait the two to three years for them to disappear from my record and then reapply.

4) My last visit to the US Embassy in Tokyo. During this entire process I had to go only twice. Once to get a copy of my US Passport notarized (as "proof of citizenship"), and one of the guys working there asked why. I explained, he said "I'm pretty sure you have to have Permanent Residency in order to naturalize", at which point I might have been a bit freaked out if I didn't have my lawyer telling me otherwise. I neither married a Japanese national nor applied for permanent residency during this process, I skipped straight from "three year Humanities work visa" to naturalized Japanese national.
The second and final time I visited the US Embassy was to pay them the $2350 seen above.

Q: Why did you have to pay your birth country in order to--
A: I have no idea.

So what was it all for? This: the back of my driver's license stating my nationality changed on October 16th, 2017. The line under that states my name change as a newly-minuted Japanese person.

Q: You have a Japanese person name now? How does that--
A: Your last name is entirely up to you. You can keep your original family name, in the Roman alphabet, if you choose. You can change it to any of Japan's three writing systems. You can give yourself an entirely new last name in any language you like. It is all you.
Your first name is stricter. It not only has to be in kanji, but it has to be readable in that kanji, which is kind of difficult to explain without getting into the details of the language but: Kanji come with their own pronunciations that, while they do vary, they are decided. So if you give birth to a child in Japan and you want to give it the kanji name 星, which is pronounced "Hoshi" and means "Star" in English, and tell people "Hey, my child's name is written like "Hoshi" but I want you to pronounce it "Star", like the English word"--you are free to do that. I had a student named 海, which is pronounced Umi or Kai and means Ocean, but her parents decided it would be pronounced Marine, like the English word "Marine". It's like taking the name "Jason" and registering that it is to be pronounced "Bob". We call them "Kira-kira names", which basically means "shiny names".

Yeah, you can't do that when you naturalize.
By complete coincidence my very, very, very American first name also exists in Japan already, and has two or three different commonly used kanji that I was free to pick from to write it. The official still took out a handy-dandy kanji chart to look up both kanji characters in my name and confirm that I was trying to write them and pronounce them in the approved way.

Other common names in Japan that you will also find in America: Ken, Dan, Sara, Erika, Mary, Lisa, Naomi.

Q: "Had a student"? Are you an--
A: I was an English teacher for five and a half years. I then managed an art festival for six years, and it was during that job that I applied for Japanese citizenship and received it just in time for my tenth anniversary in the country. I have now lived here 13 years. You don’t have to wait ten years to apply for citizenship. You can apply after five years living in the country.

And there you have it.
Q: Is the process reversible?
A: No. If I were to ever go back to America I would need to get a visa, just like any other foreigner. If I wanted to become an American citizen again, I would have to go through the application process for American citizenship just like any other foreigner. I have no desire to do either of these things, and I'm grateful everyday for this decision I made three years ago.

Q: What made you want to do this?
A: That's a whole 'nother post.