I found out I was stateless when I was 11 years old. It was such a shock. I frequently fought with my mother over the matter, at times blaming her for all my misfortunes. Everyone else had a nationality, why didn’t I? It seemed only natural for a child to have the nationality of her mother. At times, people laughed at me for being stateless1. These spectral humans, deprived of ontological weight and failing the tests of social intelligibility required for minimal recognition include those whose age, gender, race, nationality, and labor status not only disqualify them for citizenship but actively “qualify” them for statelessness… [T]he stateless are not just stripped of status but accorded a status and prepared for their dispossession and displacement: they become stateless precisely through complying with certain normative categories... In different ways, they are, significantly contained within the polis as its interiorized outside.2 1 Witness Naomi Takioka described the anguish of stateless children/adults by introducing the motivation in an application for naturalization at the 101st National Diet Session House of Representatives Justice Committee (1984). Quoted in Mizue Tsukida, Nihonno mukosekiji to kodomono fukushi Stateless Children in Japan and Child Welfare (2008), pp.108-109. 2 Judith Butler and Gayatri Spivak, Who Sings the Nation-state? Language, Politics Belonging (2007), pp.15-16. ） （ 6