JOURNAL OF ETHNIC AND MIGRATION STUDIES 975 entertainment and hotel facilities (Truong 1990, 167). This opened the service sector, not only tourism, to the international market (Truong 1990, 167). In the 1970s, Japan experienced economic growth and started supplementing labour shortages with cheap foreign labour. One industry that suffered from a labour shortage was, just as Choo mentioned about Korea, the nightlife industry (Choo 2016, 13). Although the Japanese government did not formally accept unskilled migrant labour until 2019, ‘entertainer visas’ were issued to Filipino ‘professional bands’ during the Vietnamese war era.5 In the late 1970s to early 1980s, this entertainer visa began to be issued to female Philippine migrants. Thai female migrants followed – Thailand experienced severe social impact from foreign soldiers, and international investments towards entertainment and hotel facilities were boosted during the stationing of foreign troops during the Vietnamese war (Truong 1990, 167). Thus, in the late 1970s to early 1980s, partly as one of the legacies of proxy war in Asia, a female migration flow from the Philippines and Thailand to Japan was observed. This flow peaked around the mid-2000s and decreased afterwards.6 The inflow has been intricated with female migrants with spousal visas and other visas (Celero 2012; Faier 2009). However, this feminised migration flow also brought intimate relationships that resulted in the birth of children between migrant women and local men (Suzuki 2010, 34). The encounters tended to be as customers and service workers in night life service industries (Faier 2007, 148), under what Massey calls the power geometry of time–space compression – different social groups are differently placed in the compressed space (Massey 1994, 149). Under that schema, local men are often disregarded when it comes to the responsibility of caring for a child, including securing the child’s nationality (both legally and socially). It is socially acceptable for local men to abscond their responsibility, stigmatisation, and guilt as fathers. This is in sharp contrast to the migrant women who are already in precarious situations, as they tend to be exposed to responsibility, stigmatisation, and guilt as mothers (Butt, Ball, and Beazley 2016, 796; Constable 2014, 9). Under such migration schema, stigmatised and gendered images of people from the Philippines and Thailand have prevailed, and these immigrants tended to be marginalised in Japanese society (Celero 2012, 8; Pongponrat and Ishii 2018, 136). Children born to these migrants are often typically stigmatised (Ishii 2013, 175; Suzuki 2015, 119). Children of foreign parentage left at Japanese orphanages Since the early 1990s, children have been abandoned by migrant parent(s) at orphanages in Japan. Although few recent studies focussed on statelessness in Japan (Chen 2016; Komai and Azukisawa 2009; Seki and Odagawa 2017), newspapers have reported on this topic (e.g. Asahi 1993; Nihon Keizai Shimbun 1991; Yomiuri 1994). The Japanese Federation of Bar Associations reported that, although no statistical data were available, the number of (de facto) stateless children increased in the late 1990s, as the number of unauthorised migrants increased (Japan Federation of Bar Associations 1997, 67–68). Indeed, the number of unauthorised immigrants receiving deportation orders increased from 17,157 in 1989–64,697 in 1995 (Immigration Bureau of Japan 2005). Two surveys (Okuda 2002; Ishii and Azukisawa 2019) examined the nationality statuses of abandoned children in Japanese orphanages, revealing that some children abandoned by migrant parent(s) had ambiguous nationalities. In 2000–2001, the ‘International Social