US citizen who was stripped of Japanese nationality: ‘it’s against my human rights’

Retired lawyer Yuri Kondo, 75, who was born in Japan and became a US citizen in 2004, found out in 2017 that she’d had her Japanese nationality stripped from her

She is fighting for right to dual citizenship and says thousands more Japanese are being ostracised by homeland, by law that’s out of touch with modern world

Reading Time:4 minutes

An elderly Japanese woman, a retired lawyer, is fighting for the right to hold both US and Japanese citizenship. Photo: Shutterstock

Published: 2:00pm, 19 Mar 2023

Yuri Kondo is tired of being a so-called ‘grey zone Japanese’ who had her nationality stripped away when she lived in the US and took American citizenship out of convenience.

Now living in Fukuoka, in southern Japan, the retired lawyer has filed a lawsuit requesting that the government alter a law that is more than a century old and, she claims, violates the constitution.

Kondo is fighting for the right to have dual nationality and says thousands more Japanese are being ostracised from their homeland by a law that is out of touch with the modern world. And it is ironic, she adds, that the government is stripping many Japanese people of their citizenship when the country is facing a population crisis.

“In my lawsuit, I am claiming that the government does not publicise the details of the law or the implications,” said 75-year-old Kondo. “In my case, I did not know that the law existed or that I would lose my Japanese nationality if I became a naturalised American.”

Born in Kamakura, Kanagawa prefecture, near Tokyo, Kondo moved to the US in 1971 to attend graduate school and became a lawyer in Arizona in 1997. She became a US citizen in 2004 and renewed her Japanese passport with no problems in 2007.

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