Required time spent living in Japan to apply for citizenship likely to double too.

There’s long been a perception from the international community that, in terms of immigration laws, Japan isn’t very receptive to the idea of foreigners living in the country indefinitely. However, out of the 12,248 applications filed by foreign residents in Japan seeking to acquire Japanese citizenship in 2024, 72.4 percent were approved. Meanwhile, statistics show that as of the end of last June, 932,100 foreign residents of Japan have permanent residence status, a legal status that allows them to live and work in Japan indefinitely while retaining their home-country citizenship (an arrangement more or less equivalent to the United States’ “green card” program),

Obtaining Japanese citizenship and permanent residence are both likely to get harder soon, though. Japanese Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi has called for a review of the current requirements, and the committee is expected to formally recommend making them stricter in at least two ways.

Starting with the requirement for citizenship, the current law requires the applicant to have lived in Japan for at least five years in order to be eligible for consideration. Under the expected proposed revision, this amount of time would be doubled, to a minimum of 10 years living in Japan.

The five-year requirement was the focus of criticism by some Japanese politicians earlier in in the year, on the grounds that it’s shorter than the requirement for permanent residency, for which the applicant must have lived in Japan for at least 10 years in order to be eligible for consideration. Seeing as how citizenship is the more binding status (unlike permanent residency, it cannot be revoked, and it also carries voting rights and other privileges not given to foreign-citizen permanent residents), it does seem odd that, under the current system, permanent residency has the more stringent requirement for amount of time spent living in Japan.

The committee doesn’t appear to be planning to recommend lowering the time-spent-living-in-Japan requirement for permanent residency in exchange, though. Actually, it looks like its plan would be to make that harder to obtain too by making a certain level of Japanese language proficiency a requirement for permanent residency.

Currently, there is no language proficiency requirement for permanent residency, as the application is judged on amount of time spent living in Japan, good standing with the law, and the ability to be financially self-sufficient and contribute to Japanese society. The committee is also expected to recommend permanent residency applicants complete a course on how to integrate smoothly into Japanese society, in the interest of preventing friction between foreign residents and the preexisting community.

It is worth noting that the committee hasn’t referred to any sort of formal exam, such as the Japanese Language Proficiency Test (JLPT), to determine communication skill level. And in fact, a level of Japanese proficiency sufficient to avoid serious problems in daily life is already part of the citizenship application, with the evaluation of the applicant’s language skills being based no their ability to communicate during their interview.

Right now, there’s no interview included as part of the permanent residency application, so adding one, with criteria similar to the one used for citizenship applications, seems like the simplest, and most likely course of action. With the relatively low bar of being able to function in daily life, and a full decade in which to acquire that skill level before becoming eligible to apply for permanent residency, meeting the language requirement shouldn’t be too hard, but foreign residents who’ve managed to spend their time in Japan in work/social circles where Japanese isn’t used very much might want to brush up if they’re seeking permanent residency.

An unusual wrinkle to all of this is that the committee isn’t expected to attempt an explicit amendment to Japan’s citizenship law. Proponents of extending the time-spent-in-Japan requirement to 10 years point to how the current law says that a minimum of five years are required in order to be eligible for consideration for citizenship, but do not guarantee the application will be approved. Because of that, they assert that a de facto requirement of 10 years should be permissible even without amending current laws. It’s unclear, though, if this same rationale could be applied to the addition of completely new requirements such as language proficiency, to permanent residency applications, or if parliamentary approval to amend the law would be necessary.

The committee is scheduled to officially make its recommendations in January.

Source: Jiji, Asahi Shimbun, Gyoseishoshi Ishinagi Office
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