972 S. K. ISHII produce statelessness in relation to time. Ordinary responses by state officials, normal common-sense attitudes by orphanage staff, typical welfare regulations to protect orphans, and neutral-looking citizenship regulations intricately result in the abandoned child’s statelessness. This paper illustrates the social structure Massey identified, saying ‘Differential mobility can weaken the leverage of the already weak’ (Massey 1994, 150). Massey (1994) argues that the ways in which people are placed within ‘time–space compression’ are highly complicated and extremely varied (Massey 1994, 150). This paper illuminates how one type of labour migrants move in a complex way. Massey argues that some people move more than others, and that some have more control over others; thus, the mobility and control of some groups can actively weaken other people (Massey 1994, 150). The process of further weakening the weak can occur over generations, leading to what McAuliffe referred to as ‘intergenerational exclusion and marginalization’ (McAuliffe 2017, 223). This paper aims to present typical cases of the ‘the weak’ in those arguments. In this article, I first discuss two theories on the legal production of illegality and the relationship between the law and the clock, which together produce the legal production of statelessness. Then, I contextualise the female migration flow from Southeast Asia to Japan and focus on children left in Japanese orphanages. Next, I examine the statelessness of abandoned children through the lens of the legal production of statelessness, focusing on time. The vignettes4 below show that, whereas presumptive foreign nationality (which a local government assigns without confirmation from the assumed home country) and considered nationality (the personal opinion provided by officials about people’s nationality) render children’s statelessness invisible, their status gradually shifts from de facto statelessness – individuals who cannot seek assistance from the state to which they may be formally attached by nationality (Blitz 2006, 455) – to de jure statelessness – people without any nationality, the ‘literally’ stateless (Bhabha 2011, 1). I highlight two pathways through which the passing of time pushes abandoned children into legal limbo. Finally, after examining the combination of the analytical frameworks of the ‘legal production of illegality’ (Mahdavi 2016, 122) and ‘the law and the clock’ (Gonzales 2016, 17), I conclude that there is a gap between the legal definition of abandonment and the reality of abandonment experienced by the stateless children – ambiguous, time-consuming abandonment. Sociological perspectives on abandoned children Abandoned children have been understudied despite their potential place in citizenship and migration studies. A few studies on abandoned children’s statelessness have recently appeared (e.g. Mahdavi 2016). Mahdavi argued in her book, Crossing the Guls, that such children’s lives have been shaped by the complexities of migration through the two interconnected approaches of ‘perverse integration’ and theories about ‘the legal production of illegality’ (Mahdavi 2016, 122). One of her approaches, the ‘legal production of illegality’ (Mahdavi 2016, 122), is an analytical framework considering how illegality is created by laws that define people as citizens or noncitizens (Boehm 2012, 136; Coutin 2007, 26). Building upon studies on illegality, unauthorised status, and statelessness of children ‘living in the uncertain legal status and caught in the legal limbo of Temporary Protected Status (TPS) (Gonzales 2016, 9)’, this article illuminates abandoned children’s status as an