Paper short abstract:

This paper investigates identity and identification of statelessness in Japan. Will sort them bases on legal status and identification. Also this paper aims to clarify the gap of identity and identification of statelessness.

Paper long abstract:

This paper focuses on stateless persons who reside in Japan, describes them based on their legal status, and analyzes their substance. Statelessness are those who do not have nationality nor are accepted as citizens from any country. According to the statistics of alien registration as of the end of 2012, the number of the people whose nationality is "stateless- mukokuseki" is 1,100 in Japan. On the other hand, however, according to the writer's research, it became clear that there actually exist people who do not have nationality of the nation they believed to have had at the time of their procedure for alien registration.

In this paper, we define stateless people as those who do not have valid nationality, in other words those who actually do not have rights and duties as citizens, and divided them into five types. From that sorting, we can see that there actually are of great variety even though we bracket them together as "stateless persons". We can understand that each stateless person of each type has different reasons for becoming stateless, has different situation he is in, and has different writing in nationality (or stateless) in his identification. We also reveal what kind of problems those stateless persons face lately since the residence management system was adopted in July 2012, and indicate the action that Japan is required to take according to each type of stateless person.