Did you read the article? The census considers anyone with Japanese citizenship to be "Japanese". Therefore it's useless as a measure of ethnic diversity.

I don't think it's useless at all in that Japan is one of the hardest country on earth to get citizenship.

I've got family in Japan. All you need to do is to go to Japan to see that it's very "japanese".

You can get residency semi-easily but getting citizenship is extremely hard.

It's not the EU or the US where a huge lot of "foreigners" can become citizen.

Note also that Japanese law implements blood citizenship and not birthright citizenship. Domestically born children of immigrants remain immigrants, in general.

If by immigrants you mean immigrant non-citizen residents, that's how it is in most of the world.

Very notably not in the US, however. All persons born or naturalized in the United States and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside.

Because of our history of slavery and settler colonialism more generally. The circumstances differ because of our somewhat unique historical circumstances, although some European countries enacted similar measures for their former colonies.

Sure. Was just pointing out that Japan doesn't adhere to some bizarre purity policy: it's just the worldwide default. It's the USA who is an outlier.

Arudo Debito, who was born in America but became a Japanese citizen in the 1990s, wrote a detailed article comparing the two countries' naturalization processes:

http://debito.org/naturalization.html

>You can get residency semi-easily but getting citizenship is extremely hard.

As far as I can tell from the description of the procedures involved, it's actually easy - and certainly easier than the US, and it requires less time in the country to apply than some European countries. One reason why it's uncommon however could be because Japan does not allow dual citizenship, and it's harder to get into the country in the first place other than teaching English.

It is actually quite easy to become a Japanese citizen. I’d be interested to hear where you got the impression that it is difficult. It basically requires 5 years of legal residence, a steady job, mediocre language ability, and paying taxes properly. For many people, attaining citizenship is easier than permanent residency.

> About 2.2% of Japan's total legal resident population are foreign citizens

You've conflated "citizenship" with "ethnicity".

Normally that is a valid point, but for Japan there is an enormous overlap.

> enormous

How enormous? We wouldn’t need words like that if we looked at the right numbers.

https://www.turning-japanese.info/2016/09/totals.html says:

> As of 2015, a total of almost 581,000 people have become legally Japanese since the fall of the shogunate and the rise of constitutional "westernized" Japan.

This seems consistent with other sources I found while doing a quick search.

This suggests less than 1% of the number of citizens of japan was not born a citizen.

Of course, some of those people will have children and those children's ethnicity could be not Japanese ethnically (or partially) but still the number of citizens of Japan that are not ethnically Japanese is quite small, and the number of citizens of Japan that are not ethnically east asian is much smaller still.

Also a lot of the Koreans in Japan migrated before 1940, peak in 1930. So the Koreans taking up citizenship are often third generation living in Japan, after beeing culturally fully integrated. So according to your numbers it would be fair to put the 'real foreigners' who took citizenship in the 0,1 to 0,3% range.

The census figure quoted in these wiki articles is exactly the statistic the author is refuting in the start of this article.

no, you really missed the point of the article: citizenship is not ethnicity