I did a quick search and as far as I can tell there is no Japanese citizenship test. There is a test of Japanese language skills but even that is not described as a high bar. Maybe this has also changed?
Did they substantiate this claim at all? All available public information is that the vast majority of those who try succeed.
People largely don't apply for citizenship, in part because Japan requires them to renounce other citizenships to do so, and in part because a permanent resident can do almost anything that a citizen can in practice.
Often you can and in those cases Japan generally requires you to. However it would depend on the citizenship in question.
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".
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.
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).
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.)
>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...
I don't think one can meaningfully use the difficulty of a citizenship test as a data point in an argument with zero contextualization. How hard exactly is it compared to the test your average country has in place? Maybe no such survey exists but
Guidelines for Permission for Permanent Residence [1]
> In principle, the person has stayed in Japan for more than 10 years consecutively.
What are the conditions for naturalization? [2]
> The person must have been domiciled in Japan for five years or more consecutively
Sorry, I need to disagree with you.
The process is fairly straightforward and formal. You need to fit very few and fair formal criteria, but if you do, then there is nothing special about the process.
For a sincere applicant, there should be severe reasons why citizenship is not granted. There are statistics by nationality. I think Chinese, Korean and South Eastern nationalities are topping the statistics.
Here is a good starting point for better understanding of the process. https://www.turning-japanese.info/
Excerpt:
[...] the seven requirements [...] .
1) Have continuously lived in Japan for 5 years or more?
2) Be 20 years of age or above, and be a legal adult in my home country?
3) Be of upright conduct? [///]
4) Have a way of supporting myself and my family?
5) Be willing to give up my other nationality/ies upon acquisition of Japanese nationality?
6) Have never plotted to destroy the current government of Japan?
7) Have a Japanese skill level enough to go about daily life, and be a functioning member of Japanese society?
>Having a culture that just says "we're happy to have you work here for a while, but you'll never really belong here" isn't really a good sign for long-term integration.
For a lot of people this isn't really a big issue. Having a small group of close friends matters way more for people. If anything, it can feel like a relief to not have to be held to such a high standard where you start to lose your identity.
And being in Melbourne she couldn't leave the house for some of that either.
They did make it annoying to come back, however. Several different friends had to do long quarantines in not-great facilities.
Like, it’s clear whoever wrote that law didn’t deliberately exclude foreign residents, he just didn’t consider them a thing at all. Like ‘Japanese Nationals’ should comprehensively cover everyone in Japan.
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.
1) Citizenship is needed in order to vote. Important for the health of any democracy; but in a country where it seems to be LDP all day every day anyway, immigrants can hardly be faulted much for not placing much value on this aspect.
2) For Americans, Japanese citizenship allows them to revoke their American citizenship, in order to avoid double taxation. (Not an issue for other nationalities, where the ludicrous concept of double taxation doesn't apply.)
That's about it as far as I can think of. Add to that the fact that Japan doesn't recognize dual citizenship, it's no surprise most immigrants are satisfied to just stick with permanent residency.
Note that the bar for permanent residency has been lowered in recent years, making it more easily attainable than an equivalent status in most other industrial nations.
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.
Still, I expect the numbers from Asian countries to steadily increase—unless we go into some pandemic lockdown again.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I am aware that Germany does.
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.
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...
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.
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.
She said that she has never had any trouble entering Japan on her Japanese passport.
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...
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.)
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.
It depends on what living on a visa acually means in practice. Under what circumstances can you lose your visa? If it can happen overnight if you lose your job (like the H-1B in USA) that is bad. On the other hand, if renewal is pretty much guaranteed until retirement age unless you did a crime, that's perfectly fine.
It's not nearly as bad as the US. And yes, from what I've heard, renewal is pretty much guaranteed unless you badly fuck up somehow.
That's wrong. The same rules apply. After 3 months immigration can (but is not required to) force you to leave the country. Both for HSP and e.g. specialist visa types.
Welcome to the life of a lot of people on visa in the USA, country made by immigrants which makes it stupidly hard to become a permanent resident!
/s
Is it really strange though? It's same in Czechia, first you must hold temporary residency for at least 5 years before gaining permanent residency, then after 5 years of permanent residency you can apply for Czech citizenship, so it takes minimum 10 years to apply for Czech citizenship, by then most foreigners who moved here are already gone.
> Permanent residents are allowed to apply for Japanese citizenship after five years.
I recall reading a news article from a few years ago that said that the Japanese citizenship test is almost impossible to the point that few people try. Everything I've read about Japan has stated that the overall culture is extremely hostile to granting citizenship to non-native people, even to many mixed-race people of Japanese descent (e.g. from Brazil).
Having a culture that just says "we're happy to have you work here for a while, but you'll never really belong here" isn't really a good sign for long-term integration.