Hello,
I am from the states and am hafu. I have both a Japanese and American surname. For example Soto-Smith. I plan on moving to Japan within the next couple years after I save up more money.
How would having a dual surname like this impact my life over in Japan? Would I have to give up a last name or would it make paperwork an extra pain due to existing laws? I know there are other hafu with similar situations but I haven’t heard or seen any resources on this issue.
Thank you for your time and consideration!
4 comments
Whatever name is on your passport or koseki is what your name is. Japan culture is a bit more developed then primary school, so aside from some questions over drinks, I don’t see any issues that would come up.
They use whatever name is on your passport.
Paperwork anywhere is going to be a pain in the butt. A lot of documents (physical and online) don’t have space for long names. Let alone they don’t do hyphens. So your name would become Sotosmith. Typically having a middle name or double barrel last name is not worth it. If possible try to have only one displayed on your passport. Life is doable, it’ll just be 10x more annoying.
No issues regarding discrimination if you’re wondering. People will just panic because your name may or may not fit in their system and there still isn’t an acceptable way to deal with them. On letters they will usually manually write your name if it goes over the limit (or the remaining letters) and it also makes getting credit cards infinitely difficult.
Are you a Japanese national or just of Japanese ancestry? If the former, your name will be would be whatever is on your Japanese koseki (and Japanese passport). If the latter, your name will be what is on your American passport – no kanji for the Japanese portion of your name.
Hyphens will not work in most cases in Japan, but you can often put a space between names as well. In cases where spaces are not permitted, you will need to run the names together. If whatever procedure you are doing does not require strict ID verification, you can also use just one name as convenience (I have 2 given names and 2 surnames that are hyphenated on my passport, and I use just one of each whenever possible for convenience, have to use full name for all banking and govt procedures though of course).
You mention that you are halfu, but do not mention whether you are a Japanese citizen with a koseki. If you do have a koseki, if it has both surnames they would be run together with no space in between, with the Japanese name in Kanji and the foreign name in katakana.