Japanese-Filipinos battle for homeland nationality

Though she grew up in the Philippines, Constancia Masae Yoshimi knows the words to "Aikoku Koshinkyoku," a wartime song, by heart. She can write--in kanji--her Japanese name and also her father's name, Masahichi Yoshimi.

Pacensia Sadako Tanaka, 81, meanwhile, recalls four Japanese children's songs she learned as a child, including "Shojoji no Tanukibayashi." She says her Japanese father, Yukichi Tanaka, was from Kumamoto Prefecture.

Both the diminutive 75-year-old Yoshimi and the white-haired Tanaka are stateless, possessing neither Japanese nor Philippine passports.

The two, who spoke at a news conference March 24 in Tokyo, are among six people from the Philippines claiming to be the offspring of Japanese emigrants and their Filipino wives. The Tokyo Family Court rejected their petitions on March 11.

The six were among 103 claimants who have filed applications to establish a Japanese family registry with the Tokyo Family Court since 2004. Setting up a family registry is necessary for gaining Japanese nationality.

These six claimants were the first to be denied since the process began.

Yoshimi says she attended a Japanese school in the Philippines as a child. Her father came to the Philippines in the 1920s and married her Filipino mother; he went missing around 1940.

The six claimants have appealed the family court decision to the Tokyo High Court.

The family court dismissed their claims because their fathers, whose whereabouts are unknown, cannot be confirmed to be Japanese nationals, among other reasons.

Japan's nationality law when the claimants were born stipulated that any child fathered by a Japanese national was automatically a Japanese citizen.

The 103 claimants have presented the court evidence and documents to back their claim.

As of May 15, just 22 people had been granted family registry rights in Japan.

At least 3,000 people in the Philippines claim to be children of Japanese. Of them, some 800 have been unable to back their claim with birth certificates or their parents' marital certificates, all lost in the wartime confusion.

They can restore such papers through what's called "late registration"--by gaining testimony from people who knew them or their parents back then. But the Tokyo Family Court ruled that the claims for the six were not credible.

The decision has left petitioners whose documents were also gained through late registration feeling uneasy.

The petitioners are second-generation descendants of Japanese men who went to the Southeast Asian country before World War II and married Filipino women.

At one time, about 30,000 Japanese nationals lived in the Philippines, mainly farming Manila hemp. But their peaceful, affluent lives took a disastrous turn when war broke out.

The imperial Japanese military conscripted the Japanese and their male children. After Japan lost the war in 1945, the Japanese were forcibly returned to their homeland. Their wives and children were abandoned in the Philippines.

Left to fend for themselves, the families endured strong anti-Japanese sentiment in the postwar years. Many second-generation descendants of Japanese grew up in poverty, denied education because of harsh discrimination.

Today, their quest for Japanese nationality reflects a yearning to establish an identity after decades of hiding their Japanese ancestry.

It has an economic dimension as well.

If they are officially recognized, up to fourth-generation descendants of Japanese emigrants will be allowed to enter Japan to work.

Filipinos of Japanese descent have long struggled at the bottom of the social ladder.

In contrast to the struggles faced by Japanese-Filipinos, the path for war-displaced Japanese left in China was relatively smooth.

So far, about 1,400 war-displaced Japanese from China have won Japanese nationality, even though their relatives have not been identified. Their family registries were created based on a list of such people compiled jointly by the governments of Japan and China.

Lawyer Hiroyuki Kawai, who represents Japanese-Filipinos seeking Japanese nationality, has also worked on a case concerning Japanese displaced in China.

"The Japanese and Philippine governments should come up with a similar list," Kawai said.

Japan's welfare ministry is not cooperating, however.

The Foreign Ministry funds efforts to verify if claimants are the offspring of Japanese emigrants to the Philippines, but the Ministry of Health, Labor and Welfare, which aided in the search for relatives of Japanese left in China, is not eager to help.

The welfare ministry says the two situations are different. Japan has never severed diplomatic ties with the Philippines, unlike with China.(IHT/Asahi: May 23,2009)