When Yuki Shiraishi passes through immigration at one of Tokyo’s airports, she is hit with a wave of shame and embarrassment.
While her parents whizz through the line for Japanese nationals, she is stuck with the foreigners, surreptitiously trying to hide her Swiss passport.
Shiraishi is one of an estimated 1 million citizens forced to give up their Japanese nationality when they became dual nationals.
The issue was thrust into the spotlight when tennis star Naomi Osaka won the US Open. The 21-year-old has a Japanese mother, a Haitian father and was born in Japan, but raised in the US.
She has dual citizenship, but will technically have to decide by her 22nd birthday which flag to play under, unless Japanese authorities turn a blind eye to a special case.
Shiraishi, now 34, is battling for change. With a group of others, she filed a suit this year against the Japanese government in a bid to reform what critics see as an antiquated and obsolete system.
She was born and raised in Switzerland, her parents working for the UN and the UN High Commissioner for Refugees.
Shortly before she turned 16, she took her parents’ advice and obtained Swiss nationality to facilitate day-to-day administrative issues. It was only when she returned to Japan, six years later, that she realized what that decision meant.
Her father, a lawyer, advised her to return her Japanese passport.
“For him, there was no question of me living ‘hidden,’ residing against Japanese laws by holding two passports in secret,” she said.
She went to the consulate and describes a sad experience of feeling thrown out by her own country.
“I realized that, without any reason, I was being rejected. I was being cut away from my country, even though I was born with a Japanese passport, my two parents are Japanese and I still have very close ties with Japan,” she said.
What really stung was when her name was transformed for official purposes from the traditional kanji characters to a Western-style alphabet.
“I pretended that it was just an administrative thing, but in fact, it really hurt,” she said.
Hitoshi Nogawa, who is also suing the government, lost his Japanese nationality after gaining a Swiss passport and blasted what he said is a law stuck in the past.
“Japan was closed off to other countries for around 250 years and the lawmakers at the time never imagined that Japanese people would one day go to work abroad,” the 75-year-old said.
Shiraishi said the law is “absurd” and has “stripped me of my nationality without my consent.”
“I am Japanese and Swiss, like a child who sticks to two parents, not just one of them,” she said.
The relevant department in the Japanese Ministry of Justice declined to comment on the specific case “because it could interfere” with the legal procedure.
However, authorities said that the law cuts both ways — it also allows people the freedom to give up their Japanese nationality if they choose.
According to the letter of the law, anyone who has not chosen either way within the period prescribed is required to make a decision within a month or they are stripped of their nationality.
However, in practice the justice ministry has never sent such a demand.
It said that it was aware of 900,000 people with dual nationality between 1985 and 2016, but the actual figure could be bigger or smaller.
For Shiki Tomimasu, the attorney in charge of the suit, that makes the law all the more ridiculous.
“Everything rests on a personal declaration, so unless an individual admits to having dual nationality, the government will never realize,” Tomimasu said.
Japan is one of about 50 countries in the world that allow only one nationality. In Asia, China and South Korea also impose such a law.
Atsushi Kondo, a law professor at the University of Meijo, near Nagoya in western Japan, said that there is one main reason the government is unwilling to change the law.
“The majority of the population want Japan to remain a country of one people and perhaps linked to that is the idea that we do not want to become a country of immigration,” Kondo said.
Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) is to visit Russia next month for a summit of the BRICS bloc of developing economies, Chinese Minister of Foreign Affairs Wang Yi (王毅) said on Thursday, a move that comes as Moscow and Beijing seek to counter the West’s global influence. Xi’s visit to Russia would be his second since the Kremlin sent troops into Ukraine in February 2022. China claims to take a neutral position in the conflict, but it has backed the Kremlin’s contentions that Russia’s action was provoked by the West, and it continues to supply key components needed by Moscow for
Japan scrambled fighter jets after Russian aircraft flew around the archipelago for the first time in five years, Tokyo said yesterday. From Thursday morning to afternoon, the Russian Tu-142 aircraft flew from the sea between Japan and South Korea toward the southern Okinawa region, the Japanese Ministry of Defense said in a statement. They then traveled north over the Pacific Ocean and finished their journey off the northern island of Hokkaido, it added. The planes did not enter Japanese airspace, but flew over an area subject to a territorial dispute between Japan and Russia, a ministry official said. “In response, we mobilized Air Self-Defense
CRITICISM: ‘One has to choose the lesser of two evils,’ Pope Francis said, as he criticized Trump’s anti-immigrant policies and Harris’ pro-choice position Pope Francis on Friday accused both former US president Donald Trump and US Vice President Kamala Harris of being “against life” as he returned to Rome from a 12-day tour of the Asia-Pacific region. The 87-year-old pontiff’s comments on the US presidential hopefuls came as he defied health concerns to connect with believers from the jungle of Papua New Guinea to the skyscrapers of Singapore. It was Francis’ longest trip in duration and distance since becoming head of the world’s nearly 1.4 billion Roman Catholics more than 11 years ago. Despite the marathon visit, he held a long and spirited
China would train thousands of foreign law enforcement officers to see the world order “develop in a more fair, reasonable and efficient direction,” its minister for public security has said. “We will [also] send police consultants to countries in need to conduct training to help them quickly and effectively improve their law enforcement capabilities,” Chinese Minister of Public Security Wang Xiaohong (王小洪) told an annual global security forum. Wang made the announcement in the eastern city of Lianyungang on Monday in front of law enforcement representatives from 122 countries, regions and international organizations such as Interpol. The forum is part of ongoing