Middle name in Japanese passport (dual citizen)

12 comments

1. This is probably a question you need to ask your local consulate or embassy.

   However, my experience with my children is that the name on their Japanese passports needs to conform to the name in the koseki.

2. Please choose carefully to avoid a lifetime of problems with Japanese bureaucratic entities.

   (Ask me how I know . . . 😭😭😭)

3. Why would you need to reference your Mexican passport? Technically, you should only have single citizenship in japan.

4. How old are you? You’re only allowed one citizenship in Japan, after a certain age you either get to choose japanese or mexican.

5. It’s up to you. You can decide what to put on your Japanese passport. My daughter has 3 passports, US, Canada and Japan. On her US passport her last name includes mom and dad’s and 2 middle names. But her Japanese passport only has mom’s last name and used one of her middle names as first name.

6. No dual citizenship in Japan, if the government found out a person have another citizenship, even pure Japanese will be forced to renounce their Japan citizenship. Choose one or all of your rights, properties, works etc will be forever at risk

7. Most answers in this thread don’t know what they are talking about.

   You have 2 questions:

   – can you omit your second first name, even though it is in your koseki?

   Most likely you cannot. However, by showing an official document such as foreign passport or birth certificate, you have the option to select a “non Hepburn romanization”. This may or may not allow you to insert a space in between the two first names (probably not, but worth asking). In any case you need to use non Hepburn romanization in order for the Mexican given name spelling to match the real Mexican spelling instead of being based on the katakana spelling.

   – should you include your Mexican family name in brackets on your Japanese passport even though it does not appear on your Koseki?

   Either way is possible (though you cannot change it later). It could make things easier to have both in order to match your Mexican documents. But you can’t choose the order (it will necessarily be the non bracketed Japanese family name first).

8. Your passport will have the same name as your koseki. You may choose to have another name in brackets for either or both name fields if you want to.

9. To retain your Japanese citizenship your parents must register at Japanese consulate within 90 days after birth.

10. I’m a japanese dual citizen with two passports, and have renewed my passport multiple times. Your japanese passport name has to match whats written on your Koseki. You’ll need to submit the koseki as part of your application, it has to be an original copy no older than 3 months I believe. You’ll need to get a family member or yourself to get the copy of the koseki in person.

11. Hello OP

    TL;DR: Some personal experience peppered in [with what /u/Tokyo-Entrepreneur says in their response to you](https://www.reddit.com/r/japan/comments/1k85o30/comment/mp45tom). Good luck.

    —–

    I believe I might be in an extremely similar situation to you as a (from birth) US-Japanese dual citizen with two last names in my life. I will preface by saying that except in certain third-country situations that I have involved myself in, the issue is going to be more commonly one of a mental identity crisis over that of any legal or administrative issues, so long as you are willing to use one name in one country and the other name in the other. In the case of the third-country situation, you may be eventually forced to choose which name and passport you wish to use in those countries, but it is generally accepting you can choose whichever is best for your situation and then _stick to it_ (and hence, I use my Japanese passport when visiting that third country in question).

    —–

    My ‘Given Name’ in my US and JP passport is the same “First Middle” (with the space). Fortunately, the US makes no point of separating First and Middle names in its officially issued national documents, so that was never the issue in my life.

    However, on my US passport, my ‘Surname’ is “FathersLastName” and on my JP passport, my surname is “MotherLastName” _ONLY_ on the biographical machine-information line [at the very bottom of the passport] (as like you, my mother is the Japanese citizen and as you are already well aware, Japanese citizenship follows the family registar _koseki_ documents). However, on the passport’s readable section, it states “surname (alternative surname)” and it lists “MothersLastName (FathersLastName)” on it. Now, again, mind you that when I live in Japan, I have a _Koseki_ (which since I am now married, is these days my own) and even when I was a child, it only lists “MothersLastName FirstMiddle” in Japanese (and without a space between the first and middle name, including katakana where necessary, though my middle name is a single Kanji character and my mother’s surname is as good as 伊藤 or 山田 it is so common).
    Hence, with that documentation _too_ in hand, I made my own bank account at a major Japanese bank (and ended up using it again to change my wife’s bank account information to prove our marriage), and for my own accounts, I faced no issues.

    —–

    Now, a story about what issues I did actually encounter that might fit the type of issue you are worried about to some extent, even if they were not strictly “my” issues:

    (When changing my wife’s bank account information earlier this year, the lady could not accept that “山田 WifeFirstNameinKatakana” (not the actual name, but to give you an idea) on the Koseki and YAMADA WIFEFIRSTNAMEINLATINALPHABET on the Zairyu Card were the same, and so I snapped and told the teller “lady, if you can read that Kanji in any other way, I challenge you to tell me that to my face”. As a result of that and other frustrations, her supervisor eventually took over the rest of the interaction, but _still_ made so many other mistakes that I ended up having to come back in with my wife two days after that to meet with yet their supervisor (the super-supervisor) to make the other corrections, finally ending that fiasco.

    My wife and I now have a standing agreement to avoid ever going to that bank branch again, not least of all because the middle-level supervisor made a passive-aggressive point that since the bank branch where our accounts made is now far from where we live, we don’t need to make a special point to go there to do official activities if the same bank has another branch closer to our current residence…)

    —–

    [post 1/3 since it seems this whole thing is too long for Reddit to handle]

12. I have a middle name and US/Japan passports

    I put my middle name in my Japanese passport in parentheses (I don’t have my middle name on my koseki actually) so it reads

    firstname (middle name) lastname