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> 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.

[1] https://www.moj.go.jp/MINJI/minji78.html#a09

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...

They don't check citizenship lists but you must show proof of renouncing the citizenship attached to the passport you used to enter the country.

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)

Don't authorities require evidence that you have given up your previous citizenship? Singapore does.

I wonder how that works for countries where it is a crime to give up the citizenship, does Singapore make an exception?

I am aware that Germany does.

Some countries have no provisions for giving up citizenship (Argentina I think) so I wonder what happens in those situations.

It's the same in China from what I've heard. Dual British Chinese citizens often just don't tell China that they've become British citizens.

I've definitely heard of cases of people who've had their Japanese citizenship revoked after the authorities found out they were a dual national.

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.

Quick corrections:

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] https://cotoacademy.com/study-hours-needed-pass-jlpt-compari...

[2] https://brighttax.com/blog/the-american-foreign-tax-credit-e...

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.)

Any tips for passing the N1 with ease? It seems daunting..

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.