TOTTORI, Japan - A 95-year-old Japanese-Filipino woman left behind in the Philippines after World War II has had her request for Japanese nationality denied, her lawyer revealed Friday.
Rosalina Kamba Fernandez submitted her application to the Yonago branch of the Tottori Family Court in March, two months after she visited Japan on a trip funded by the Japanese government as part of its broader effort to help descendants obtain citizenship more than 80 years after the end of the war.
But the court rejected it on Wednesday, citing a lack of supporting evidence, such as her parents' marriage record.
She will immediately appeal to the Hiroshima High Court, according to the Philippine Nikkei-jin Legal Support Center, a Japan-based group supporting her and other Japanese descendants in the Philippines.
Fernandez's lawyers argued that, based on a DNA test and her own recollection, her father was Rita Kamba, a Tottori Prefecture native who died in 1983, and that she should be granted Japanese citizenship.
She applied for it in 2024 at the Tokyo Family Court, but the request was denied on similar grounds. She said documents proving her parents' marriage had been lost during the war.
In January, she visited Kamba's hometown of Hoki in the western Japanese prefecture under the Japanese government program and met residents who had known him. She said she remembers meeting her father once when she was about 10 years old.
