Photo/Illutration Josefina Iwao Pama, second from left, and Carlos Teraoka, third from left, hand over signatures from the Philippines asking for support to acquire Japanese citizenship for the descendants of Japanese left behind in the Philippines to Yukio Ubukata, right, of the parliamentary association for friendship between Japan and the Philippines, in Tokyo on Oct. 29. (Rei Kishitsu)

A group of descendants of Japanese who emigrated to the Philippines before World War II met with politicians in Tokyo on Oct. 29 to petition for citizenship.

"Our long postwar era is not over yet," said Carlos Teraoka, 88, a member of the delegation comprising children of Japanese left behind after the war.

"Please do something so that we can feel good about being children of a Japanese and be at peace before we die," Teraoka added.

There are about 1,000 such individuals in the Philippines who remain stateless due to wartime confusion.

The delegation arrived in Japan on Oct. 28 seeking collective relief and support for Japanese citizenship.

They met with members of the parliamentary association for friendship between Japan and the Philippines, which is headed by Lower House member Nobuteru Ishihara, the following day.

The delegation submitted about 34,000 signatures collected in the Philippines and about 7,000 gathered from people in Japan.

Yukio Ubukata, a Lower House member and vice president of the association, said: “I didn’t know about the issue of the second generation at all. We, as the association, will take the matter seriously.”

Hiroyuki Kawai, a lawyer who heads the Philippine Nikkei-jin Legal Support Center, said, “We should not remain indifferent to the situation in which many people were born to a Japanese father but have remained without a nationality.”

Kawai added that the government should make an effort to address the issue.

During the wartime years, both Japan and the Philippines adopted a "paternalism" approach to granting citizenship, meaning that a child born to a Japanese father and Filipino mother were eligible for Japanese citizenship. However, due to the death of the father or forced repatriation, many such children were unable to complete the procedure and have remained stateless even into their 80s.

The requests for citizenship have been largely rejected in the past due to a lack of supporting documentation.