978 S. K. ISHII kept by the orphanages to highlight these children’s existence and emphasises the legal, political, and social systems implicated in their statelessness. Orphanages maintain copies of documents such as birth certificates and original letters left by mothers certifying that they were foreign nationals. Orphanages have no legal obligation to certify children’s legal statuses because welfare regulations presume that orphaned children are Japanese nationals, and there are no items in the Child Welfare Act of Japan relevant to certify orphans’ legal statuses (Japanese Law Translation 2009). However, orphanages maintain all registration records issued by the Immigration Bureau, copies of nationality request application documents, and replies from the Ministry of Justice and embassies. To protect children’s privacy, pseudonyms are used in the vignettes instead of real names (with the exception of Andrew, a child whose identity was revealed by the news media and whose mother provided informed consent). Time and the legal production of statelessness The nationality law regulates how to prevent Japanese-born children from becoming stateless. Why, then, does statelessness still happen among children born in Japan? Two different pathways lead to this situation, described below, emphasising the role of time, with a special focus on the gap between legal regulations and the reality of abandonment that appeared in my interviews, which ignores the reality of the long time that is required for child abandonment. In other words, legal regulations tend to secure the rights of nationality for children, so people’s (de facto) statelessness tends to be made invisible during their childhood; people realise their (de jure) statelessness only when they finish their childhood. The first happens when children miss opportunities to undergo formal procedures to acquire citizenship during childhood because of presumptive foreign nationality placed by local officers on their local ID cards. The second pathway occurs when children miss opportunities to undergo formal procedures to acquire citizenship during childhood because of the considered nationality that foreign embassy staff members attribute to the child considering him/her as a national (of their own country). In both cases, children and those who surround them, including orphanage staff, realise their statelessness too late. Presumptive foreign nationality Some abandoned children miss the opportunity to complete the formal procedures to register their nationalities because they and their legal guardians mistakenly believe that the child already has foreign nationality. This misunderstanding is caused as the children have a designation on their Japanese government-issued ID cards even though no one has confirmed the registration of their nationality with a foreign country. Building on Saito’s work (1997, 80), I call this ‘presumptive foreign nationality’. The vignette of Hiroto and Ayaka, presented below, represents how abandoned children miss crucial opportunities to register their nationalities because of their presumed foreign nationalities. The quotes below came from interviews with orphanage staff members between December 2017 and April 2018. Hiroto and Ayaka were siblings born to a Japanese father and Filipina mother who used to live together in Japan. Their mother was what