Japanese-Filipino children’s painful quests for filial recognition and citizenship

Global Voices reports that thousands of Japanese-Filipino children have been left effectively stateless, born to Filipino mothers and Japanese fathers who never legally recognized their paternity. Over ten thousand are considered stateless, a legacy of the entertainer visas that brought tens of thousands of Filipino performers to Japan during the nineteen-eighties. Japan amended its Nationality Act in two thousand eight to drop the requirement that parents marry, but the law still demands that the Japanese father formally acknowledge paternity, something many children struggle to obtain when fathers cannot be found or refuse to recognize them. As Global Voices tells it, advocacy groups like Tokyo's Citizens' Network for Japanese-Filipino Children continue to press for these children's right to belong, even as many grow up in poverty and face discrimination in both countries.

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