More news on dual citizenship in Japan

Today a follow-up article on dual citizenship appeared in the news as the Japanese politician I mentioned the other day admitted that she did indeed still have her Taiwanese citizenship. 

The law is that you are supposed to choose by the age of 22 and if you choose your Japanese citizenship you can't keep your other citizenship. Apparently, though, (and we have heard this) it is common to just not say anything about the other citizenship and it's fine. In 31 years of having this rule, there have been no penalties awarded (i.e. removal of Japanese citizenship).

But this is a real issue for many people we know. In CAJ's school profile it lists the number of nationalities as 35, with 34% of the student body (464 students) as having dual passports. Not all of these are Japanese-non Japanese families but a high percentage are.

Here is a telling portion of the article:

Accepting it [dual nationality] officially would be very difficult politically, as Kono [a politician who tried to introduce legislation allowing dual nationality] found out in 2008, and touch on lots of sensitive issues related to nationality identity. It is pretty much politically taboo at this time.

This isn't just an issue being discussed in Japan. As you know, globalisation is happening around the world:

Since 1960, the number of countries where citizenship is automatically lost after an individual chooses to acquire another nationality has halved to around 60 — or 30 percent of the nations on Earth — according to a recent Mexican study. At the same time, the number of dual citizens has risen dramatically in countries that collect data on this issue, on average doubling in the decade or so between censuses. 

Tiniest office ever?

I found this perched on a building site around the corner from our house. The tiniest mobile office ever?

Who is Japanese?

Just 1.5% of those living in Japan are foreigners. Japan is a monocultural country. It is something they pride themselves on and something that's being increasingly challenged. Not so much by immigrants, but by Japanese people marrying non-japanese people and having babies. 

When you have the image that a citizen equals someone who has 100% of their genes from one race, to have people who consider themselves Japanese but who don't have 100% of their ancestors as 100% Japanese, that's challenging. The other day some Japanese friends said to me that they think Japan is unique in this day and age in this regard. I beg to differ, but I can't think of an example off hand, perhaps you can?

A former OMF colleague from Canada has recently become a naturalised Japanese citizen and through him I discovered a fascinating English blog about the topic of naturalisation in Japan. Notably it says:

If it comes up, I never say I'm just "Japanese" (日本人Nihon-jin) because the word is overloaded with multiple meanings in both the English language and the Japanese language. It can mean the following things with respect to people, in order of assumption:

1. Japanese race
2. Japanese ethnicity
3. Japanese nationality

Predictably there is discrimination in a society like this. But I was particularly encouraged by this blog post about the positive personal experience of the writer (a naturalised Japanese) of ethnically Japanese people's responses to finding out his citizenship was Japanese.

Multicultural JapaneseMulticultural Japanese are making an impact in this country, even if small. There have been several multicultural Japanese people in the news recently.

Several of the multicultural Japanese represented Japan at the recent Olympics, for example Aska Cambridge, who was part of the 4 x 100m Japanese relay team who won a silver medal. This article in the Japan Times explains the issues surrounding this topic very well.

For the second year running Miss Japan is not 100% ethnically Japanese. See an article about it here. That has ruffled some feathers, challenging the nation's concept of who is 
Japanese.

And a politician was vying for the top spot in a party leadership election has a Taiwanese father and Japanese mother, provoking discussion about the dual citizenship laws in Japan. As far as I understand it from this article, dual citizenship is not allowed in Japan, however no one has lost their citizenship since this law came into place in 1985.

Immigration
Immigration is low compared to where I come from. Only half a million people since record taking began in the 1800s. However that is a tough comparison. Over 25% of Australia's population are immigrants, one of the highest rates in the world, higher than the UK or USA, Canada, or New Zealand.

Interestingly, many people think that becoming a Japanese citizenship is hard. But  I've discovered that according to statistics only a couple of hundred are denied every year, and over 98/99% are approved. There are rumours that people are discouraged from being citizens. Indeed apparently many people do pull out some time during the course of their application, but the reasons listed in this article don't include intimidation by authorities, though that doesn't preclude that possibility. I've also heard that spouses of Japanese citizens aren't allowed to become citizens, but this article is written by someone married to a Japanese citizen who became a citizen.

The rate of naturalisation is about 15,000 per year. In fact the rate of acceptance in Japan is commensurable with other countries with a similar number of applications. According to this blog post, Japan is in the top 15 countries in the world in terms of countries where people want to become citizens. It turns out there aren't actually that many countries in the world that people want to emigrate too!

I'm not intersted in becoming a Japanese citizen. But I've found it interesting to learn about the issue. I'm wondering how much this land is going to change in the years to come, especially with an increasing rate of multicultural marriage? And will the immigration rate go up? 

Encounters of the multicultural kind at school

We have a senior this year. That means we confront a number of cultural issues at school. Some, but not all, are specific to the school. Some are American, some have significant Asian influences. But it remains that this is the first time we've done this, so there are new experiences in the pipeline.

Here are some that we know of:

Graduation (of course). This I've written about this on my blog a few times as a spectator, but this year we get to experience it as parents. It is quite American, closer to what an Australian experiences at university, not high school.

Senior photos. This is also a big deal and is happening this week. They dress up in formal clothes (provided by the photographer) and have individual photos, having booked an individual sitting time. This photo goes into the yearbook. We were offered a variety of deluxe sittings, and one with additionally outfits, which all cost more, of course.

Working for the senior trip. The seniors go to Thailand in March where they do some physical work to help tribal people in the north of the country. The CAJ handbook describes it as "a service trip in the spring to another Asian country as part of their global issues class". In order to do so they are required to work 25 hours in the next six months doing things like selling food at sporting events (called Concessions, see here for an explanation).

Senior talent show A fundraiser for the above trip. It is taken very seriously and students audition for it. As a result the standard is very high and the show enjoyable.

Pre-graduation parents and senior banquet This is a bit like an Australian "formal", but seniors don't go as couples (though I guess some may). Parents go with their students. I'm pretty sure that the student's organised our own formal, but this is something parents organise.

Graduation after-party This has become a tradition in recent years where most of the students are taken a couple of hours east to the Pacific Ocean and they watch the sun rise, then they come back. This is also organised by the parents.

Today I ended up at a meeting that talked about the last two of these things. We talked over lunch, but it was complicated. We have cross-cultural issues. American school, multiple cultures within the student/parent body, and school-specific traditions. At this gathering today we had a lot of Japanese mums and some bicultural mums (either married to Americans or have spent a number of their years overseas) and four Westerners (two Americans, me, and someone from the UK). Japanese do meetings differently to Westerners. An additional difficulty is a lack of a clear leader willing to take on responsibility for organising stuff. It took several hours and I'm still not clear on what exactly we achieved except that I volunteered to write an email!

I'm not good at meetings and meetings like this I really stink at. It was hard to hold my tongue. I'm also not good at organising events, so you might wonder how come I stuck around. I think it basically comes down to knowing that this needs to happen and volunteers are needed. With the "wrong" volunteers it could rocket out of control into something very expensive: in a financial and time sense. So by choosing to be involved, hopefully I can help keep things reasonable. We'll see how that pans out.

We've been through a "graduation" once before with this class, in eighth grade (graduation from middle school). It was challenging too (read my blog post about that event here).

The multicultural (as opposed to bi-cultural) layers that we live with on a day-to-day basis makes things interesting, that's for sure!

Convenient Tokyo Trains

The trains in Tokyo are amazing. There's no other way to describe it. They're plentiful and on time. Yes they can be crowded and you have to stand more often than you get to sit (depending on where you live and when you travel). But people are generally orderly and courteous. 

This is a photo of the weekend timetable for our local station (which is 500m or a five to eight minute walk from our house). Every number represents a train. The colours indicate type of train, as in how many stops it makes. I find it amazing that even on the weekend in the middle of the day there's eight trains an hour! Convenience!

Cross country season begins

Today we started the mega school year of sports. The only year we'll have three boys involved in interschool sports. They can't do this until they are in middle school at CAJ (though of course our youngest son already and unusually has done this twice last year during the wrestling season).

This is the sixth season of cross country we've been privy to in seven years (we missed the year we were in Australia, of course). Our eldest (currently grade 12) started running in sixth grade too. It's great to see him sticking with the sport even though it's not what he's best at. 

So it felt right, heading out early this morning. Indeed it is hard to contemplate being here and not going with the boys to cross country, though we'll probably have to face that one day. With sporty kids our lives have a predictable routine to them at this point in our lives that involves lots of Saturday sport. Cross country in September and October. Wrestling from December through to February, and track and field from late March to May. November is a cruisy month!

It's been great to see them all involved, though our middle son was very disappointed to have to pull out of running today with an injured ankle. It was particularly satisfying to see our youngest run. He's been dragged along to his brothers sporting events for six years now as a spectator. Hard for the boy that has the largest dose of competitive zeal of all our boys. With him just starting, this year is the midpoint of this sporting-spectatorship role of being parents. At least six more years to go after this one. Good thing we enjoy it. But as you can see it is a gorgeous venue, especially when you consider this is Tokyo!

Appreciate the small things

I caught up with an international friend over coffee today. We've not sat down to chat for ages, maybe a couple of years. The two of us have shared some adventures over the six years we've known one another. The most notable being getting lost in Tokyo on foot after a snow storm. 

Our catch-up was wonderful and typical for such an interaction (between two missionaries) went deep fast. She's a little newer at this missionary gig than me and wondered what advice I had for staying the course for the long-term. 

Here's one: Take moments to appreciate the small things. 

I'm not a big-city gal and miss the open green spaces. But I've found ways to cope in Tokyo. 

Here's a photo I took early this morning while lying on my pillow looking almost straight up. We have two windows in our bedroom and granted the view isn't magnificent (I can see two or three houses from my pillow), there is the sky. And sometimes it's just worth drinking in in the morning during our time pondering the Bible and praying together before our day starts. 

Here's more sky. I noticed this on my way home on Monday afternoon. I'd spent nearly three hours traversing the city on trains. In all that travel there is continuous city, a truth that can depress you if you let it. It was wonderful to find this sky after all that.  

Recently I've often walked past this little display of gorgeousness poking out of one of the local yards. The other day I paused a moment and snapped a photo to show you.