TOKYO: The Japanese government plans to invite to Japan this summer stateless people born to Japanese nationals and left in the Philippines after World War II, to coincide with the 80th anniversary of the end of the war, Jiji Press has learned.

The government will help them collect information so they can take Japanese nationality and will also arrange meetings for them with Prime Minister Shigeru Ishiba.

“It is fully reasonable” for the children of Japanese people who migrated to the Philippines “to visit Japan and search for their families at the expense of Japanese citizens,” Ishiba said in a meeting of the Budget Committee of the House of Councillors, the upper chamber of the Diet, Japan’s parliament.

He added, “I would like to realise meetings with them if such meetings will allow Japan’s thoughts to reach them.”

Many Japanese people moved to the Philippines from the beginning of the 20th century. With local anti-Japanese sentiment high after the war, many of their children hid the fact that their parents were Japanese and became stateless as a result.

The Japanese government plans to invite some 10 stateless people believed to have been born to Japanese nationals who migrated to the Philippines from the prefectures of Hiroshima, western Japan, and Okinawa, southernmost Japan. The 10 or so are those whose parent-child relationships have been difficult to prove by investigations conducted in the Philippines by the Philippine Nikkei-jin Legal Support Centre, a Tokyo-based nongovernmental organisation.

If, while they are in Japan, they can find proof that their parents were Japanese, they will ask courts in the country to add their names to the family register system.

The aging of the second generation of Japanese in the Philippines has progressed as 80 years have passed since the war ended.

According to the Japanese government, more than 1,600 people of that generation have taken Japanese nationality. As of last year, over 50 of them were hoping to register their citizenship.

Published in Dawn, March 10th, 2025