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Comment by recurser | Hacker News Reader

> 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...

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>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.

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