Once you are living in the country for a while, you can pretty much do anything and people don’t care about your resident status at all. For my daily lives in UK I only need my address and driving license. You pretty much have the feeling that you’ll be fine without bothering to do the paperwork, that’s how things work in the last 20-50 years.

I thought Japan requires 10 years residence for PR, but only 5 years residence to naturalize, in which case it wouldn't be surprising if many people naturalize before getting PR!

It absolutely is.

I can recommend keeping a list from now on. It's helped me quite a few times.

Australia generally requires at least 10 years for some things.

> On-Topic: Anything that good hackers would find interesting. That includes more than hacking and startups. If you had to reduce it to a sentence, the answer might be: anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity. [0]

This gratifies intellectual curiosity -- how does one become a citizen in one of the most isolationist countries? What is that like??? Read this to find out.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

1. Nerds like Japan.

2. People with money like acquiring passports.

3. This community has above average representation of both.

The study of arcane procedures and immigration of all sorts comes up here very often.

I upvoted it because I found it interesting. That is all.

It's interesting. That's it. That's the only criteria.

I knew Japan made it difficult. I clicked, I read the whole thing. Now I know Japan makes it (nearly) impossible.

I'm a typical HN reader (I think) and I found it interesting. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

It's not but to be fair HN is full of similar exaggerated instances "I migrated my backend to COBOL because it was faster" (it's really not btw)

I agree, it’s so off topic.