A stateless person, in simple terms, is someone who doesn’t have nationality of any country. As such they often can’t access education, healthcare, employment or have their marriages recognised. Stateless parents will often pass their statelessness on to their children.
There are many millions of stateless people in the world and more than half of those known to be stateless are in the Asia and the Pacific, mostly in nations where they have been born and lived their whole lives.
Lara Tienshi Chen is a Professor of Anthropology at Waseda University in Tokyo. She’s now a citizen of Japan but was stateless for 32 years.
Her research and personal experience coalesce in her work as an academic and activist for stateless people’s rights and she published a book in 2024 which recounts her life story.
She spoke with Melbourne Asia Review’s Managing Editor, Cathy Harper.
How did you become stateless?
My father and mother are Chinese. They moved to Taiwan after the Civil War and in the 1950s they moved to Japan where I was born. In 1972, Japan normalised its diplomatic relationship with the PRC, the People’s Republic of China, and many overseas Chinese at that time had Republic of China (Taiwan) passports. With the normalisation of the relationship they had to decide whether to become Japanese nationals or nationals of the People’s Republic of China. My parents discussed it a lot and decided to be stateless—neither Japanese nor Chinese. My father didn’t want to choose the People’s Republic of China because of ideology, he escaped from China after the Civil War because of Communism. My mother didn’t want to naturalise as Japanese because her father fought against Japan during World War II as a general. My father feltstatelessness could be a good choice because we would be free from both nations. I was only one year old at the time.
You obviously would have been unaware of these issues and how they might play out. How did that decision affect the lives of your mother, your father and yourself?
Our family had legal residency status in Japan, so we were somewhat legally protected. I was able to go to school and receiving medical care was not a problem. But there was discrimination, such as when we tried to open a bank account or rent an apartment. Most people don’t understand the situation of stateless people and they aren’t accustomed to dealing them. They’re not sure whether they are a legal person. It was a problem for my brother when he applied for jobs and when he had to go on business trips. It was affecting our daily lives.
The most troublesome part for me was travelling abroad. I wanted to study overseas, but to apply to get a visa was difficult. Then I had an experience of being unable to enter any country and that’s when I really realised I was stateless. I got a visa to visit the Philippines and on the way back to Japan my mum decided to reschedule our return because she wanted to go to Taiwan for a day. Taiwan is a place that we think of as our country. We refer to it a ‘going back to Taiwan’. But when I showed my passport to officials in Taiwan, the immigration officer said he couldn’t let me in. He said I was not a citizen and I had to apply for a visa. My parents were allowed in, so I changed my flight and went back to Japan by myself. But when I arrived, the immigration officer also said I couldn’t come in. I was born in Japan and had lived there my whole life and had residency status, but this country was saying ‘sorry, you didn’t apply for a re-entry visa so you can’t come in.’ I felt like dust, something that no-one wanted and just tried to sweep away.
It sounds like it would have really affected your sense of yourself, your identity and belonging.
Yes, I was about 20 years old at the time. When I was that age, I thought that nationality was equal to identity.
Was this experience the reason you decided to obtain Japanese citizenship?
No, but I couldn’t understand why Japan treated me this way when I was born and raised there. I felt so distant from society. At the time, I didn’t know about the situation of stateless people and there was no book I could read and learn about it. I felt the only thing I could do was go to a society where I could be part of the majority, or where they at least treated me as a member of it. I moved to Hong Kong, where there’s a majority society of Chinese, but they treated me as Japanese. They would say ‘your Chinese is so good. You’re from Japan, but you speak such good Chinese’. This was not the reaction that I wanted. I decided to study in the U.S. which people describe as a cultural ‘melting pot’. I lived there for three years and applied for a job at the United Nations but even the U.N. said they couldn’t hire me because I was stateless. I realised U.S. society, and the U.N., was not as I had thought.
I decided to study statelessness myself. The main reason I naturalised as Japanese was because I wanted to do field work on stateless people in Brunei, Malaysia and other countries. In order to visit them, I needed a passport. But I was actually reluctant to be a member of a single nation because I had developed a certain identity as a stateless person. While researching my PhD I found out about the identities and the networks of the Chinese diaspora and that their identities are not only based on their ethnicity, but on multiple other elements. I realisedI could have a legal identity as Japanese and I can have other parts of my identity relating to different things.
Could you reflect a bit more on concepts of nationality, nationhood and citizenship and whether you think they make sense in a world where so many people experience transnational cultures and experiences.
If you move back and forth, or if you experience transnational migration, then you realise that how people see you and how you see yourself might be different. When people ask me, ‘where are you from?’ it’s a very difficult question for me. Where you are from can be a different place to ‘home‘ When I first went the U.S., I asked one of my teachers how should I answer. He said I could say I’m Japanese, because I’m physically from Japan. But I didn’t feel comfortable saying I was from Japan because I didn’t have Japanese nationality. And he said, ‘Why don’t you say Chinese is your ethnic background?’ But if I say ‘I’m Chinese’ people will think I’m from Beijing or Shanghai, mainland China, but I’ve never lived there and I don’t know the popular TV shows and other things from there—I’m not socially close to China. Culturally, I’m more related to Japan and Taiwan. But I don’t fit into a single nation-state. I’ve always been in-between, or overlapping, and I have many layers of identity: my legal, cultural, ethnic, and family identities, where I studied at school and religious identity. And being stateless was one of the biggest elements of my identity. I came up with the rainbow metaphor with different colours and layers. You can bridge society with these identities if you can share and respect the other side. Now I say I’m ethnic Chinese born in Japan, but it depends on who I’m speaking with. If I’m in Europe, I say I’m from Asia or from Japan. Some people describe themselves as ‘overseas Chinese’. Sometimes Chinese use their identity as a Chinese to create networks, but they could be Malaysian, or Australian, rather than Chinese.
I understand that you feel that regulating individuals with citizenship is unworkable. What do you think would be a better approach?
I think we should have a concept of citizenship that does not necessarily depend on nationality. National governments could offer a legal status such as residency that gives people certain rights. If they are paying tax that should give them membership of the place that allows them access to certain services. If they want to travel overseas they could apply for a visa and be issued special travel documents. Maybe I’m dreaming, but if all countries had the same system that could work; or if countries had a bi-lateral agreement on this type of thing then people could travel between these two countries.
What about access to basic things such as schooling and work rights and medical care and having marriages registered?
I think for schooling, for healthcare, and for marriage status, if that’s based on place and where people have lived for a certain number of years that could be accessed through a residency status. Today in Japan, the Stateless Network, which I helped set up, deals with many people from Vietnam, Malaysia or the Philippines. They consult us because they want to go overseas, but they can’t get a passport. For example, we have dealt with a boy whose residency status in Japan states that he’s Filipino. But we found out he was born in Japan to a Japanese father and Filipino mother out of wedlock. Japan registered the boy as a Filipino, but the Filipino mother didn’t send a birth certificate to the Filipino government, so he is registered as a Filipino in Japan but doesn’t have Filipino nationality. When he reached 18 years of age and tried to go overseas, he couldn’t get a passport from either Japan or the Philippines. We found his birth certificate and sent it to the Philippines government. But sometimes the mother and father are divorced and it’s complicated for the son stuck in the middle of nowhere. This kind of issue happens a lot for second generation Vietnamese refugees, and especially the Rohingya from Myanmar. Rohingya are registered as citizens of Myanmar in Japan, but they don’t have Myanmar passports. For these people who have lived in a certain place for certain number of years, we should register them so they can get some kind of membership of the nation they are in. Currently they slip in between the nation state or nationality. The Stateless Network does advocacy and works with pro bono lawyers on these issues.
How many stateless people are there in Japan?
It’s very difficult to say because Japan doesn’t have a formal system for recognising statelessness. Official statistics don’t include the number of stateless individuals in Japan. The Stateless Network looks at the residency statistics which include a category of stateless person. In 2025, they listed 482 people who are stateless, but this is not an exact number and we don’t exactly know who is in this group of 482 people. People in situations like I described earlier, from Vietnam, Myanmar or the Philippines tend to be classified in Japan as Filipino, or Malaysian or Vietnamese, rather than as stateless. The Stateless Network comes into contact with 10-20 cases every year which is not a very big number, but we usually spend several years on each case. Sometimes the person ceases contact with us because they give up. Sometimes it takes six years to solve their problem.
It must be wonderful when you resolve someone’s situation!
Yes! We are going to have a wedding party this year for someone who we helped over a period of eight years. We are going to celebrate their marriage in May and they will live in Japan.
How well you think Japanese authorities respond to this problem generally?
Japan must fully acknowledge that there are many stateless people in Japan and stop ignoring this issue. They don’t even have a system which recognises stateless people, so they need to construct a system that recognises it. It’s a very difficult issue for stateless people and when they really face problems, they’re usually already in their 20s or 30s, but they don’t speak the language of the other nation involved and it’s very difficult for them to get information. They have to face so many different governments. The Stateless Network needs to find people who can speak the language to deal with the issues and we need many specialists in many countries.
I don’t have much hope Japan will change. The current government tries to remove many foreigners, so maybe another government in the future will address the issue. We are trying to advocate and let more people know the nationality issue is very tricky. It has two sides, like a coin. One side, when you have nationality it is good, but the other side where you don’t, can be very difficult.
This interview has been edited for clarity and length.
Image: People Walking on Shibuya Crossing, Tokyo. Credit: Hafeisi/Pexels.
