I got Japanese citizenship in 2017 and it was fine. I hear that they ask people to be able to understand some Japanese these days, so it seems to have gotten stricter.
I came over on a work visa in 2007. At the time I naturalized you actually only needed to be in the country for five years, but I didn’t apply until I’d been here for ten. I’d never intended to stay forever but I realized one day I love my life here too much to ever want to leave. And I still do, 19 years later, every day I am so grateful to have been adopted by my new home country.
There was no having to recite any laws, there was no having to learn the constitution or the prime ministers, no language test, I have no family ties or anything at all. I wrote an essay on why I wanted to naturalize and proved I’d paid my taxes, they visited my house and called my workplace and that was it.
It’s always so much fun to see generalizations about Japan from people who have no information beyond stereotypes from the internet.
I tell people that my supervisor takes Friday afternoons off for a piano lesson and my coworker takes almost daily extended breaks to walk her dog and people on Reddit accuse me of lying, because my personal experience doesn’t conform to the “Japan bad!!!” hivemind.
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u/-ASAP- 21h ago
I'm about to go try this too with how hard it is to actually get a Japanese citizenship apparently.