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Comment by YouMeWeThem | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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).

> You can't renounce your old citizenship before gaining new citizenship.

Often you can and in those cases Japan generally requires you to. However it would depend on the citizenship in question.

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.)

This is not true.

>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

https://travel.state.gov/content/travel/en/legal/travel-lega...

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?

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