US citizen who was stripped of Japanese nationality: 'it's against my human rights'

Yuri Kondo is tired of being a so-called 'grey zone Japanese' who had her nationality stripped away when she lived in the US and took American citizenship out of convenience.

Now living in Fukuoka, in southern Japan, the retired lawyer has filed a lawsuit requesting that the government alter a law that is more than a century old and, she claims, violates the constitution.

Kondo is fighting for the right to have dual nationality and says thousands more Japanese are being ostracised from their homeland by a law that is out of touch with the modern world. And it is ironic, she adds, that the government is stripping many Japanese people of their citizenship when the country is facing a population crisis.

Do you have questions about the biggest topics and trends from around the world? Get the answers with SCMP Knowledge, our new platform of curated content with explainers, FAQs, analyses and infographics brought to you by our award-winning team.

"In my lawsuit, I am claiming that the government does not publicise the details of the law or the implications," said 75-year-old Kondo. "In my case, I did not know that the law existed or that I would lose my Japanese nationality if I became a naturalised American."

Born in Kamakura, Kanagawa prefecture, near Tokyo, Kondo moved to the US in 1971 to attend graduate school and became a lawyer in Arizona in 1997. She became a US citizen in 2004 and renewed her Japanese passport with no problems in 2007.

When she went to get a replacement passport in 2017, however, passport office staff said they "suspected" she had taken US nationality. "They had done their research on me and I was on their 'black list'," she said.

"But there are hundreds of thousands of other Japanese who have naturalised in other countries around the world but the Japanese government has no way of knowing about them as most of those governments do not inform the authorities here."

As a consequence, the Japanese authorities are not able to identify people who have taken other nationalities, meaning the law is applied patchily and arbitrarily. "Taking my Japanese nationality away from me is against my human rights and I believe Article 11-1 of the nationality law contravenes the constitution," added Kondo, who attended the latest hearing in her case on March 13.

Presently, the US passport holder is required to get a visa to continue to live in Japan as a foreign resident.

Recent precedent is not positive. On February 21, the Tokyo High Court dismissed an appeal by a group of eight plaintiffs who claimed the ban on citizens from also holding foreign nationality violates the constitution.

That ruling supported a lower court decision in 2021 that stated dual citizenship "could cause conflict in the rights and obligations between countries, as well as between the individual and the state".

The eight plaintiffs, all of whom were born in Japan but live in Europe, said it was necessary for them to obtain the nationality for the country they were living in for work or personal reasons, but they did not want to be forced to give up their Japanese passports and rights.

Lawyers for the group said they intend to appeal to the Supreme Court. An editorial on February 23 in the Asahi newspaper said the nationality law "may be out of tune with today's world, where countless Japanese cross borders regularly for business or daily life activities".

It added that around 1.3 million Japanese live abroad, with 550,000 of those being permanent residents. Many may need to obtain the citizenship of the country where they live but may be unaware that doing so would void their Japanese nationality, the editorial said.

It criticised the existing legislation as "exceptionally rigid and harsh" and called on the government to take steps to amend the law before the Supreme Court is required to make a decision.

Some 76 per cent of countries around the world now allow citizens to have dual nationality, often with conditions such as language ability or residency requirements, although it is still outlawed in several Asian countries, including China, Vietnam and Myanmar.

In Japan, there is also effectively a two-track system as children born to a Japanese parent and a foreign parent can have two passports until the age of 20 but are then supposed to select one or the other.

"I do not understand why they have this rule - it makes no sense to me," said 23-year-old Alyssa Dunn, whose mother is Japanese and father is Australian. She often visits Australia "and right now I still have both passports because I have not had to replace my Japanese one since I turned 20, but that will happen in a couple of years and I will have to make a choice".

She said she does not want to give up either nationality "because I am from both countries and if I want to work in Australia in the future, it would be much easier if I had an Australian passport that allowed me to live there".

Kondo said that with the rise in international marriages, thousands of half-Japanese people are going to face the same dilemma.

She suggested that the government does not pursue them with the same vigour as full Japanese who have taken another nationality, and said that failing to admit to having another passport was often sufficient to get around the rules.

Her own case, however, is rather different.

"For people like me, the ministry is being very strict," she said. "And when I pointed out in my lawsuit that all the other G7 or G20 nations permit dual nationality, the government's response was that lots of other countries only permit one nationality.

"They gave me the examples of China and Vietnam," she said. "It's amazing to me that Japan is using two countries that are not democracies to support their position when Japan is meant to be a nation that is answerable to the people."

This article originally appeared on the South China Morning Post (SCMP).

Copyright (c) 2023. South China Morning Post Publishers Ltd. All rights reserved.