Natural

I became a citizen of Japan.Let me share about it. Some is my anecdotal experience, some my opinion, and some facts. Parsing which of these is what in each sentence is not going to happen.In 2012, I was at the Legal Affairs Bureau for something else and decided I wanted to start naturalizing. I had been thinking about it for a long time. I stepped into the department that handles naturalization.Intentionally, the Government of Japan has designed the process of obtaining Japanese citizenship to be opaque, demand extensive documentation, take at least a year, and have an outcome based partly on subjective judgment.At the first 2012 visit, an old Ministry of Justice bureaucrat kindly listened to my initial consultation. A first consultation usually requires an appointment, but he accommodated me. This would not happen today. Far more people are now applying for citizenship. The Legal Affairs Bureau for Hachioji was then located in Minami Osawa, within city limits but far away on the…