I Became a Citizen of Japan

(derekwessman.com)

84 points | by luu 4 hours ago ago

25 comments

  • sonar_un an hour ago

    Stopped when he said he waited forever to get naturalized, skipping 6 years, and then saying he never got his permanent resident card, so he was just living off renewed visas, and they thought it was strange.

    It is strange. A lot of the things he said he needed, would have been done in the permanent residence portion of his time in Japan. Just as it is in any country.

    • charlieyu1 an hour ago

      Once you are living in the country for a while, you can pretty much do anything and people don’t care about your resident status at all. For my daily lives in UK I only need my address and driving license. You pretty much have the feeling that you’ll be fine without bothering to do the paperwork, that’s how things work in the last 20-50 years.

      • tene80i 6 minutes ago

        What do you mean? Any major employer in the UK will need more than that for you to work there.

      • GalaxyNova 19 minutes ago

        that's... really abd

    • klipt an hour ago

      I thought Japan requires 10 years residence for PR, but only 5 years residence to naturalize, in which case it wouldn't be surprising if many people naturalize before getting PR!

  • precommunicator 37 minutes ago

    I'm pretty sure this is more data than what's required for security clearance.

  • gcanyon an hour ago

    > every address you've ever lived at, and the dates you lived there.

    Well cross Japan off my list. I would not be able to produce that residence list under any circumstances.

    • Qazpqaz 32 minutes ago

      I can recommend keeping a list from now on. It's helped me quite a few times.

    • NolF an hour ago

      Australia generally requires at least 10 years for some things.

  • yipinwong 2 hours ago

    why is this HN worthy or related?

    • pinkmuffinere an hour ago

      > On-Topic: Anything that good hackers would find interesting. That includes more than hacking and startups. If you had to reduce it to a sentence, the answer might be: anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity. [0]

      This gratifies intellectual curiosity -- how does one become a citizen in one of the most isolationist countries? What is that like??? Read this to find out.

      [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

    • devin an hour ago

      1. Nerds like Japan.

      2. People with money like acquiring passports.

      3. This community has above average representation of both.

      • zaik an hour ago

        If you like acquiring passports, then I'm not sure if you want to go for the Japanese one, since you have to give up your previous citizenship afaik.

        • devin 27 minutes ago

          The fact that multiple replies to my post know this fact only serves to prove my point though. :)

      • klipt 44 minutes ago

        > People with money like acquiring passports.

        Japan doesn't allow dual citizenship, so not very attractive for people who want more than one passport.

    • underdeserver an hour ago

      The study of arcane procedures and immigration of all sorts comes up here very often.

    • romanhn an hour ago

      I upvoted it because I found it interesting. That is all.

    • santoshalper an hour ago

      It's interesting. That's it. That's the only criteria.

    • gcanyon an hour ago

      I knew Japan made it difficult. I clicked, I read the whole thing. Now I know Japan makes it (nearly) impossible.

      I'm a typical HN reader (I think) and I found it interesting. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

    • neya an hour ago

      It's not but to be fair HN is full of similar exaggerated instances "I migrated my backend to COBOL because it was faster" (it's really not btw)

    • ganelonhb 2 hours ago

      I agree, it’s so off topic.

  • contingencies an hour ago

    Having learned too my own share of languages and conquered bureaucracy and process across them, the manner in which this guy writes comes across as vomit-inducingly glib.