The Stateless Network Youth (SNY) is a volunteer youth group in Japan that works in cooperation with the NPO Stateless Network. SNY started in 2014 after students of Waseda University in Tokyo attended a seminar and a photo exhibition on statelessness.
The seminar was organized by Chen Tien Shi, a professor of the university.[1] Professor Chen invited Greg Constine, who photographed stateless people all over the world, to exhibit his photographs in the seminar to make people become aware of the existence of stateless people and their actual situation.
Professor Chen herself, who was born and raised in Japan, was a stateless person for over thirty years. Her experience of statelessness led her into a career spanning academia and activism. She also advocates for the respect for the human rights of stateless persons.
Several students led by Mihana and Christine (former students of Professor Chen) decided to establish SNY with the goal of gaining more knowledge about issues related to statelessness and raising awareness of the issues to the general public. They also started volunteering to support stateless people.
SNY attracted students from other universities as members. As of 2024, its members include students from Waseda University, University of Tokyo, International Christian University, University of Tsukuba and other universities. Some high school students are also participating in SNY activities. SNY focuses on three approaches - learning, sharing and being there for the stateless people. SNY works to realize a society where stateless people can live comfortably.
First Activity
SNY held its first major activity in 2014. Organizing a photo exhibition focusing on the Rohingya people, SNY invited Rohingya people in Japan to share their experiences living as stateless persons. Since then, SNY has been holding some awareness-raising events and learning activities. It started field work in 2017 in Tawau and Semporna in Malaysia where many stateless children were living. SNY is also sharing information on SNS, Instagram (@statelessnetwork_youth) and YouTube (under the channel name Stateless Network Youth SNY)
Online Study Sessions
Due to the pandemic, SNY held an online seminar titled "What is 'Stateless'?" in June 2020.
Starting with this first online event, it continued to hold online events. People of all ages and affiliations participated in these events.
It created a picture story show for the online Waseda University School Festival. This picture story became the basis of its story book entitled The Rainbow Pendant: What is Nationality?
In addition, members held regular online study sessions to deepen their understanding of statelessness.
Malaysia Study Trip
SNY organized a study visit to Malaysia in 2017 to understand the situation of stateless children. The SNY members visited Tawau and Semporna in Sabah state in Borneo Island where a significant number of children were stateless.
A great number of the stateless children in Malaysia were born to families who came from Indonesia and the Philippines by boat. Some of the children were Sama-Delaut, a nomadic people living on seacoasts along the borders of the Philippines, Indonesia and Malaysia.
The study visit aimed to achieve the following objectives:
The students visited schools especially those established for stateless children. They went to the place of the Calvary Love Foundation that provided education to stateless children in Tawau, Sabah.
Calvary Love Foundation is the only licensed education center for undocumented children in Malaysia, having over three hundred children between the ages of 5 to 16. Its tuition fees are meant to cover the basic cost of teaching materials. Some of the children apply for sponsorship for their education.
The basic education includes studying three different languages (Malay, English and Chinese) which are widely used in Malaysia, learning vocational skills to enable them to find good jobs in the future, and cultivating their attitude and behavior to address the violence and hygiene issues. This education is expected to improve their status in life and bring positive impact to the local society.
Calvary Love Foundation offered lessons for secondary school education in 2017. But few students successfully pass the national examination given at the end of secondary education called the Sijil Pelajaran Malaysia (SPM) examination. Passing the SPM examination would provide more opportunities for the children to obtain stable and relatively high paying jobs in the future.
The SNY students met the teachers and school officials in Calvary Love Foundation to gain insight into their educational philosophies and methods that support and educate the children and identify specific challenges that they were facing.
They interacted with the children through activities like dancing, making handicrafts and storytelling.
They also visited the home of the stateless children to gain a genuine understanding of the current living conditions, struggles, and challenges faced by stateless individuals.
Most stateless families live in areas on the fringes of cities by building their own wooden houses. In some families, the parents left Malaysia and never returned, leaving their children in the care of neighbors or relatives.
Stateless families often have many children that make sending each child to school financially difficult. Some make a living by farming and selling their produce in the market. But they face the threat of getting arrested by police during its monthly raid. They are forced to flee the markets during police raids.
The students visited the homes of stateless children in Semporna in Sabah where over 50 percent of the people were engaged in fishing, and most of them were Muslims. The families were poor and faced discrimination. They are known as Sama Bajau or Sama-Delaut, nomadic dwellers of the sea. They have been living on boats on the sea among the Sulu archipelago when the British people came to conquer the region. Since the Sama-Delaut used to live in the region without documentation, they could not show any document proving that they lived in the area even before the region was divided into countries. The lack of documentation is a huge problem if one wants to gain citizenship, and many of the Sama-Delaut remain stateless.
The students also visited Buku Jalanan Chow Kit, a non-governmental organization that provided free educational opportunities to undocumented or displaced children living in Chow Kit in Kuala Lumpur. These children were unable to study in government schools.
The parents of these children were mostly migrant workers from Indonesia, who could not gain Malaysian citizenship for some reasons, making them stateless individuals in Malaysia.
Buku Jalanan Chow Kit has a "Home School" program using the national school curriculum from kindergarten to secondary school. The subjects taught include Bahasa Malaysia (Malay), English, Mathematics, Science, Geography, History, Japanese Language and public speaking.
The organization primarily relies on funds generated from its own online store and catering services, along with sponsorships from corporate partners.
Game and Storybook
The Malaysia study visit provided the information as well as opportunity to the students to develop materials that could be used to raise awareness of the plight of stateless children.
The members of SNY developed a game that would enable the players to understand the life of a stateless person. The board game tells the story of a stateless six-year-old Muslim boy who was born in Malaysia. The board game aims to show to the players the unfair situation that stateless people live in. It allows the players to understand different life experiences and ultimately find happiness.
This game was first used in the 2023 Waseda University Festival.
They also developed a storybook entitled The Rainbow Pendant: What is Nationality? about statelessness in Japan. The book is based on Professor Chen's true story and explains the concepts of nationality and identity. It aims to inspire and encourage children to understand that everyone has the right to pursue their dreams and freedoms, symbolized by their own "rainbow pendant."
After the publication of the storybook, SNY continued its activities such as organizing events, promotional activities, and storytelling to achieve its original goals of "making more people become aware of statelessness and the importance of identity," and "giving hope to stateless children through the storybook." SNY student members read the storybook to stateless children in schools in Malaysia in their 2023 and 2024 visits.
In 2024, SNY members translated the storybook into English and started selling it online (The Rainbow Pendant: What is Nationality? @Amazon Kindle). They also plan to use the English version of the story to tell people around the world that everyone, with or without nationality, has a rainbow pendant, and can make it shine in its own unique color. This means that everyone can be a "Global Citizen."
For further information, please contact: Stateless Network Youth (SNY) via e-mail: Stateless.youth@gmail.com and Instagram: @statelessnetwork_youth
[1] Professor Chen teaches at the School of International Liberal Studies in Waseda University.