Today, I had a phone call from the Legal Affairs Bureau handling my application for Japanese citizenship. The Ministry of Justice wants me to renounce my UK citizenship, and will send the necessary documents. That means that my application for Japanese citizenship has been successful.
People who have followed my citizenship application process know that we ran into a snag with the paperwork. The Ministry of Justice required proof of citizenship in addition to a passport, but UK embassies recently stopped issuing the letters that they had previously supplied. That meant that I could not supply that particular document, and no-one at the Legal Affairs Bureau in Kawasaki knew what to do, because they were not qualified to change the Ministry’s policy. The decision at that point was to submit the rest of my application, and see what the Ministry of Justice decided.
Asking me to renounce my UK citizenship is the last step of the process. In order to renounce it, I need a document from the Japanese government confirming that they plan to give me Japanese citizenship just as soon as I renounce my UK citizenship. This is because almost all countries try to avoid making anyone stateless, at least for any longer than it takes for the paperwork to go through. Indeed, if, for some reason, the application does not go through within six months, I remain a British citizen, and the language suggests that, legally, I will be considered never to have renounced it.
This indicates that the Ministry of Justice has decided that they do not need any further proof of UK citizenship from me. (Obviously, it will be difficult to get such proof after renouncing…) From my perspective, that’s a nice decision, because it means that I do not need to spend time and money to get yet another piece of paper. I assume that it’s a generally applicable decision, as well, as I can’t see any reason why I would get special treatment. This is yet another sign of the essentially pragmatic character of the people in charge of citizenship applications here; if a foreign government does not issue a particular document, they do not insist on getting something like it.
Incidentally, it costs £223 to renounce UK citizenship. This is better than the US, which charges $2350, but still a bit pricey.
As the application part of my application is now over, I can say that my case worker did not do a home visit, and the contact people I listed have not mentioned being contacted. I did have an interview, at the Legal Affairs Bureau, and my wife was also interviewed, separately. In addition, my income for the most recent month at the time of application was substantially lower than my average income from the previous year (which was on the tax returns I had to submit), and that wasn’t a problem. (My income has gone back up again now; I got more students.)
There is one interesting question that now arises. Yesterday, I applied for my photo ID My Number card, the new standard Japanese government-issued ID (with cute cartoon bunny rabbit). Because it is new, they are issuing it to all 120 million residents at once, so they expect to actually issue the card in March. It is possible that my renunciation and naturalisation will go through before they actually get around to issuing it. Of course, if I become a Japanese citizen then, my name will change, so the card will have to be reissued before it is even issued. However, given what I’ve heard about the time take for renunciation (up to three months) and the final paperwork on citizenship (a few weeks), I rather doubt it. I’ll just have to apply for a reissue quite early on.
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