The Problem Isn’t “Foreigner.” It’s “Japanese.”

The harder question was never “foreigner.”

I was born and raised in Japan. Japanese is my native language. I can’t speak Korean. I received all of my education in Japan. I have no meaningful connection to Korea as a lived reality.

My parents were the same. Both were born and raised in Japan, and both received their entire education here too.

Yet I still had to naturalize to become Japanese.

That experience left me with a question I have never fully resolved: if I’m Korean, what exactly makes me Korean? And if I’m Japanese — which is how I have lived for as long as I can remember — why did I have to become one?

Looking for a Better Word

I made this same case myself once, in Foreigners in Japan Get a Pass. Not Everyone Gets the Same One: someone who has lived in Japan for twenty years, works here, pays taxes, raises children here, shouldn’t be placed in the same category — gaikokujin, foreigner — as a tourist passing through for a week.

The discomfort makes sense to me. There is a real difference between those two people, and putting both under a single word flattens something important. Some of these long-term residents have studied Japanese history, language, or traditional culture more carefully than many Japanese people ever do.

But the solution usually proposed — finding a better word, a new category, a more precise label — I find harder to accept. Not because the concern isn’t real, but because a new label is still a label. It draws a new line. And someone will always end up on the wrong side of it.

I started to think: maybe the problem isn’t the word “foreigner” at all.

What Makes Someone Japanese?

If “foreigner” is hard to define, it is partly because “Japanese” is even harder.

There’s a reasonably precise vocabulary for people who don’t fit the center: gaikokujin, hāfu, zainichi, nikkei-jin, and more. Each word describes a distance from Japaneseness. None of them explain what’s at the center being measured from.

Changing the label doesn’t change the system that decides that distance. A better word might soften the discomfort. It doesn’t answer who’s inside, who’s outside, and who gets treated as almost-inside.

What makes someone Japanese?

Nationality is the obvious answer. But nationality is a legal status, not a cultural one. Paper does not explain belonging.

Blood, then? But Japan is not, and has never been, as ethnically homogeneous as the standard story suggests. The idea of Japan as a simple, homogeneous nation is also more of a story than a clean fact.

Language? I speak Japanese natively. I think in Japanese. But Japanese people who grew up abroad sometimes struggle with the language and are still called Japanese without question. Language is evidence, not definition.

Education? Culture? These shift across generations. What feels distinctly Japanese to one generation feels unfamiliar to the next — a fracture I’ve traced in more detail in Which Japanese People?

Self-identification? Then Japanese identity becomes entirely voluntary — which is not how the category has ever actually been treated.

Recognition by others? Then the definition of “Japanese” is owned by whoever is doing the recognizing — which is a power question, not a cultural one.

Every definition produces exceptions. And the exceptions are not edge cases. They are real people.

Becoming Japanese on Paper

I am one of them.

I have Korean roots. My father learned Korean later in life, for work. My mother picked up some of it more recently, through Korean dramas. Neither of them raised me in Korean. Japan was — and is — the only country I have ever actually inhabited.

Still, none of that made me legally Japanese. I was not, until I chose to naturalize.

The process itself was straightforward enough. But the fact that it was necessary at all — for someone with no lived connection to Korea, born to parents with no lived connection to Korea — raises a question I keep returning to.

If someone called me Korean, I would understand why — there’s a paper trail, a history before either of us. But what would it actually mean? What is Korean about me, in any practical sense? I can’t find it myself.

And the moment I ask that question, it turns back on itself just as easily:

What is Japanese about someone who is Japanese — and if the honest answer is everything about how I’ve actually lived, why did becoming Japanese require a legal process at all?

Recognition, Not a Better Label

I think what many long-term residents may actually want, when they say the word “foreigner” doesn’t fit them, is not a better label. It is recognition — recognition as part of Japanese society, as someone who lives inside it, contributes to it, belongs to it in some meaningful way.

That is a completely understandable thing to want.

But the moment that question gets asked seriously — who belongs, who doesn’t — it runs into something nobody has fully answered:

Who is Japanese?

This question has stayed manageable by leaving the answer unspoken. It felt obvious because it was left unexamined. The question has rarely felt urgent from inside.

It is starting to feel more urgent.

The Deeper Problem

I am not arguing that labels should be abolished, or that nationality is meaningless, or that identity is purely a personal choice. None of those positions holds up cleanly either.

What I am suggesting is this: the discomfort people feel about the word “foreigner” is pointing at something real — but not quite the thing it appears to be pointing at.

The problem is not simply that Japan calls some people foreigners.

The deeper problem is that nobody has ever had to clearly explain who counts as Japanese. The outside of the category has always been easier to name than the inside. “Foreigner” feels like a legible word because “Japanese” has been allowed to remain a feeling — something understood without being said.

In my own family, that center never moved. My parents and I were all born, raised, and educated entirely in Japan. And still, on paper, I was foreign until I chose to become something else. Nothing about how any of us actually lived changed before or after that choice. Only the paperwork did.

Arguing about the label on the outside is easier than examining what holds the center together.

Which is why this conversation keeps returning to “foreigner” — and keeps not quite arriving at “Japanese.”

If this raises another question for you — how people seem to recognize someone as Japanese even without a clear definition — I explore that in How Japanese Recognition Actually Works.

All of the above is one Japanese person’s interpretation. Treat it accordingly.