JOURNAL OF ETHNIC AND MIGRATION STUDIES 2021, VOL. 47, NO. 5, 970–987 https://doi.org/10.1080/1369183X.2020.1803056 Access to citizenship for abandoned children: how migrants’ children become ‘stateless’ in Japanese orphanages Sari K. Ishii College of Sociology, Rikkyo University, Tokyo, Japan ABSTRACT ARTICLE HISTORY There is a gap between the legal definition of abandoned children and the ambiguous condition of migrants’ abandoned children. Building on the theoretical frameworks of Mahdavi’s ‘legal production of illegality’, and Gonzales’s ‘the law and the clock’, this article highlights the importance of time as a factor for the legal production of statelessness. The cases of abandoned children of Southeast Asian parentage growing up in Japanese orphanages are analysed through interviews with staff members and a survey in orphanages in Japan. Two concepts are essential to analyse the role of time in the legal production of statelessness: 1) presumptive foreign nationality (attached by a local government without any confirmation from the home country), and 2) considered nationality (officials’ personal opinion on whether people qualify to acquire nationality). The ambiguous abandonment of migrants’ children pushes them into a limbo of nationality laws and results in their statelessness once they become adults. Received 19 November 2019 Accepted 24 July 2020 KEYWORDS Citizenship; statelessness; children; Asia; Japan Introduction I really do not want to be apart from this child. But for now, I cannot live with him. I promise, I will return to pick him up, later. I am sorry I cannot pay my parturition expenses. For now, this is all I can pay. I promise, I will pay the rest later. Mother’s name A mother disappeared from a maternity ward, leaving this letter beside a newborn baby’s pillow. The nurses testified that the mother was a foreigner and that the baby’s father was absent. However, the mother told the nurses that she and her ‘husband’ were Thai, both working in Japan. They were not allowed to get married, but they would as soon as possible. The hospital staff sent the baby’s birth certification to the local municipal office to register his birth. The staff used the mother’s reported CONTACT Sari K. Ishii ishiik@rikkyo.ac.jp © 2020 The Author(s). Published by Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/), which permits non-commercial re-use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited, and is not altered, transformed, or built upon in any way.