Citizenship
 

Alright, so I was talking with this girl who claims to live in Yokohama, threw a thread on a fashion site. In the forums for Japanese Culture, she keeps fighting with this girl, who lives in Tokyo.

The girl "in" Yokohama said she needs an alien card, even though she was born in Japan. She's Caucasian (Russian/Italian).

If you're born in Japan, and not Japanese do you still need an alien card? I thought if you were born in any country, you're born under their legal citizenship. :confused:

Extracted from Wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japanese_nationality_law):

Japan is a jus sanguinis state, meaning that it attributes citizenship by blood, not by location of birth. Article 2 of the Nationality Act provides three situations in which a person can become a Japanese national at birth:

1. When either parent is a Japanese national at the time of birth
2. When the father dies before the birth and is a Japanese national at the time of death
3. When the person is born on Japanese soil and both parents are unknown or stateless

A system for acquiring nationality after birth is also available. If an unmarried Japanese father and non-Japanese mother have a child, and the parents later marry and the Japanese father acknowledges paternity, the child can acquire Japanese citizenship, so long as the child has not reached the age of 20. Japanese nationality law effective from 1985 has been that if the parents are not married at the time of birth and the father has not acknowledged paternity while the child was still in the womb, the child will not acquire Japanese nationality.[1][2] However, Japan's Supreme Court ruled in 2008 that denying nationality to children born out of wedlock to foreign mothers is unconstitutional

Many south asian countries have similar rules.

Stateless? how is it possible that a mother can just appear randomly and give birth?

i can understand if maybe you found a baby in the wild like in fairy tales.. then you could adopt it and grant it citizenship..

Ok, so if I'm understanding this right. If Jane Doe's father, Japanese or not, had obtained citizenship within Japan before her birth, this makes her a legal citizen?

If he obtained citizenship, then he is Japanese. Since you said she is Caucasian (Russian/Italian) I would be very surprised to hear her father or mother was a Japanese citizen. They might have permanent residency, but that is different from citizenship.

Yes.

Her parents must have been on a visa or were in the process of applying for citizenship when she was born.

Being in a visa and having citizenship are very different. If both her parents are Caucasian I would be very surprised to hear that either of them are on or were on any path to Japanese citizenship.

I have a question...

So if I were to move to Japan, get a Japanese citizenship, get married to another foreigner, and have a kid, would that make it so the kid would still need an alien card? Or would they be considered a 'citizen?'

You make getting citizenship (and denouncing the citizenship of your home country) sound like it takes less than five to ten years to achieve.

If you are a Japanese citizen, you are no longer a foreigner. Therefore your baby, fathered by a foreigner or not, born in Japan or not, can become a Japanese citizen if you register them properly (I believe within 3 months of birth).