the family. What I need urgently now is legal resident status. That is the priority, and then I can start to think about nationality. ” For lack of legal status and the country of nationality he could well have been detained indefinitely, though in fact he has been released on provisional parole. On the other hand, Ms. B was born in Japan in 1985 to Vietnamese parents who fled their country as “boat people” in 1980 and were admitted as an Indochinese refugee by the Japanese government in 1982. At present, she is a graduate student at a national university in Japan. Her parents have lost their Vietnamese nationality, but they are not Japanese nationals; they remain stateless along with their daughter. “My parents recommend me to acquire Japanese nationality, but I have not fully decided to do so. I prefer to exist in a framework of people that cannot be confined in the definition of “state.”125 Her cosmopolitan spirit resembles that of Dr. Aksenov. From a technically legal standpoint, given that her parents were both stateless at the time of her birth, she would have acquired Japanese nationality at birth according to Article 2 (3) of the Japanese Nationality Act. Even if her parents’ nationality could not be identified, “the provision should be applied mutatis mutandis on account of the Act’s objective to prevent statelessness. The child should be granted Japanese nationality at birth through jus soli.” 126 Her “statelessness” entails uncertainty, but her situation illustrates an institutional problem in granting nationality or determining statelessness. Nowhere to Go: Stateless Persons in Orbit Two men detained at the East Japan Immigration Center filed for cancellation of removal with the Tokyo District Court on July 29, 2008.127 The plaintiffs were born to Vietnamese refugees who had left their country in 1954 for Thailand via Laos amidst the First Indochina War. Though the plaintiffs were born in Thailand, they did not obtain Thai nationality at birth. To find a way out of the disadvantages and discrimination faced there, they left Thailand for Japan in 1991 with false passports obtained from smugglers. After working at construction sites and factories, they faced a forcible removal order to Vietnam as illegal immigrants in 2008. However, since they could not 125 The World as Seen from the Stateless Perspective, supra note 123, p.8. Kidana, supra note 3, pp.212-23. Kuroki and Hosokawa also state that from the perspective of stateless elimination, Article 2(3) should be applied mutatis mutandis (supra note 3, p.297). 127 The overview of this case and information on other similar cases are provided in the bill of complaint submitted on 29 July, 2008, which Ms. Shie Azukizawa, the attorney representing the complainants, kindly allowed us to refer to. 126 48