Originally Posted by
5khours
Good idea and actually not a drop. I just saw some statistics on this and I'm not sure if it is correct, but they said that international marriages made up 5 to 7% of the total and the birthrate for international marriages was double the national average. This means 10 to 15% of kids being born now have a non-Japanese parent. This seems really high to me...I'd be interested if anyone had seen the same number.
BTW- Many countries (U.S. included) will ignore the election to select Japanese citizenship so you can actually keep both.
That pretty much sums up the figures I've seen. Not sure if they include children with dual Japanese nationality outside of Japan.. a great deal of these will have Japanese mothers rather than fathers so won't be part of Japanese households according to the archaic way this is categorised in the consulates and embassies.
The unfortunate reality, even if one does live somewhere like the UK which allows dual nationality, is that, currently, Japan only needs to find an example of a Japanese adult using foreign ID documents for that to be grounds to strip them of their Japanese nationality. And with the war against terror and other economic/political motives meaning that more and more information of this sort is being shared amongst governments (a chilling example are the shenanigans the US government is getting up to to ensure data is given up regarding US citizens abroad so that they give accurate information to the IRS and the sort of penalties for corporations and governments that don't comply... a situation that must go both ways) hiding dual nationality is just going to get harder and harder.