Revised immigration law will freeze a welcome already cold by international democratic standards

It’s a world in turmoil, with an island of calm here and there. Japan is an island of calm. Naturally, it draws the dislocated and dispossessed. Seen as a problem, it’s a problem. Seen as an opportunity, it’s that. Japan sees it as a problem.

 New immigration legislation passed by the Diet earlier this month is an attempted solution. It’s a nuanced bill with various implications, not all of them illiberal.  A new “quasi-refugee” category will open doors now closed to victims of “conflict”  – Ukrainians fleeing Russia’s invasion, for instance. Currently only “persecution” victims  are considered – grudgingly at best, hostilely at worst, critics have long charged. The new law, Weekly Playboy (June 26) fears, will freeze a welcome already cold by international democratic standards.

Applications for refugee status are rejected by Japan in such overwhelming numbers as to make the process seemed rigged. A saving grace of sorts is the applicant’s right to reapply, repeatedly and indefinably, limited only by the constraints of a life in limbo, with no right to work and no eligibility for social assistance. So long as an application is in process, the applicant cannot be forcibly deported.

The new law will change that. It will permit forcible deportation after two rejected applications.

Broadly speaking, the world as a whole is richer, happier, more educated, more empowered and freer than ever before. But the benefits of modernity are unevenly distributed, and ancient evils persist. War is rife, persecution endemic. People who hate seek people to hate, and find them – in minorities racial, religious, political, or sexual. To the persecuted, “home” means oppression, imprisonment, torture, death. UNHCR, the UN refugee agency, counts 89.3 million people worldwide forced by violence to flee their homes;  27.1 million of them qualify as refugees, defined as “persons who are outside their country of origin for reasons of feared persecution, conflict, generalized violence, or other circumstances that have seriously disturbed public order.”

What is a peaceful and prosperous country like Japan to do? Share its peace and prosperity? And expose itself to conflict and poverty?

Or close its doors to victims of inhuman suffering and gross evil?

 The latter, by and large, has been its approach to date. Of 79,207 applying for refugee status during the 12 years from 2010 to 2021, Playboy reports, 78,830 were rejected. The 377 admitted represent 0.5 percent – as against France’s 18 percent and Britain’s 63 percent.

Ninety-six percent of those rejected by Japan ultimately take no for an answer and leave. Four percent stay on – legally if possible, illegally if not. Why? Stark and simple: “If they send me back to Sri Lanka, I’ll be killed,” says “Narbin.”

“Narbin,” 42, (names in quotation marks are spelled phonetically; accurate spellings are unobtainable) came to Japan from Sri Lanka in 2003. His father, he says, was a political activist beaten to death that year by regime thugs. The son, fearing the same fate, fled. Why to notoriously unwelcoming Japan of all places? Because this most difficult of countries to settle in is easily entered temporarily, and he was in a hurry. Registering with a Japanese language school, he obtained a student visa and was in – safe.

Precarious safety. The school folded less than a year later, and Narbin failed to enroll in another. Why? Playboy doesn’t say. Perhaps he was too busy “getting by” to worry about administrative formalities. They are important, however. Slighted, they strike back. It’s only a matter of time.

 His visa expired in December 2005. In March 2013 he was arrested. What he did during those seven and a half years we are not told. It hardly matters. He’d overstayed his visa. He was in the country illegally. Case closed, more or less.

“Go home,” he says immigration officials told him. Having no home to go to, he applied for refugee status and was provisionally released. His application was rejected. He applied again, was again rejected. He applied a third time.

Under the new law he faces forcible deportation.

He has another reason for wanting to stay. Deportation would mean “I won’t see Naomi again.” Naomi is his Japanese wife. “It’s not that I won’t go back,” he says; “I can’t go back.” 

Narbin and Naomi married in 2016. “At one time,” a former immigration official tells Playboy, “having a Japanese spouse made it easier to obtain, if not refugee status, at least some kind of resident status.”

No longer, it seems. Naomi spends much of her time these days campaigning and protesting against the new legislation, together with refugee applicants, their Japanese spouses and increasingly numerous Japanese supporters. “If my husband goes back to Sri Lanka,” she says, “what awaits him is prison and torture. I cannot let him be sent back.”

“Uchar”, 33, is a Turkish Kurd. Most democracies, Playboy says, acknowledge Turkey’s persecution of its Kurdish minority. Canada grants refugee status to 96 percent of Kurdish applicants; the U.S., to 87 percent; Britain, to 79 percent; Japan, last year, to one – not 1 percent, one person.

So why is Uchar in Japan? His reasons for leaving Turkey are clear enough. As a child, he says, he watched Turkish soldiers demolish his house –  unprovoked but sanctioned brutality against an ethnic group officially and indiscriminately branded “terrorist.” Turning 18, he faced the draft. As a soldier he would likely be forced to turn his weapon against fellow Kurds. To that, even statelessness seemed preferable. He fled.

 Invited by a relative living in Saitama, he landed at Narita in 2008 and declared himself a refugee applicant. He was arrested and incarcerated, his tourist visa revoked. Five months later, granted provisional release, he moved in with his relative in Saitama. Again, Playboy doesn’t tell us how he lived. In 2016 he married a Japanese named Mayumi. He is currently on his fourth refugee application. He too faces forcible deportation – to a “home” that may well seem to him worse than Japanese prison.

Thus it is when fate pits an individual against a country, a human being against a government – an individual with dreams, hopes, aspirations, quirks, feelings – with individuality, in short – against a government with procedures and processes and a tendency – necessity, up to a point – to disregard individuality. Most pitiful of all, perhaps, are the children caught in the legal machinery.

“I don’t speak a word of Turkish,” Playboy quotes a junior high school Kurdish girl as telling a group of lawmakers at a symposium held in April to give the children a hearing. “I know nothing of the culture; my whole life has been in Japan, I want to build a life here. Please – help me!”

© Japan Today