by Hiroshi Hiyama
TOKYO, July 28 (AFP) - For more than two weeks, 12 Turkish Kurds from two families have been staging a sit-in in scorching heat outside a building housing United Nations agencies, demanding Japan grant them refugee status.
Their protest highlights the difficulty of being recognised as refugees in Japan, even for those with apparently compelling cases.
"I want Japan to grant us refugee status. We will continue until we receive favourable answers," Ahmet Kazankiran, 48, from one Kurdish family told AFP in fluent Japanese last week.
The protesters, including a two-year-old boy and a girl, five, have stuck it out day and night with only a thin blanket to sit on as temperatures climbed as high as 39 degrees Celsius (102 Fahrenheit).
"We cannot go home (to the Kurdish region of Turkey) because I was part of the independence movement and I will be arrested if I go home," said Kazankiran, who has worked part-time to support his family since the mid-1990s but is now unemployed and reliant on support groups.
Japan accepted just 88 people as refugees from 1,415 applications in the five years to 2003, according to justice ministry figures.
It was not clear how many of those rejected were deported because applicants can appeal or re-apply with new supporting evidence, a justice ministry official said.
The ministry points out that in Japan only a small number of people apply for asylum.
Japan granted refugee status to 14 out of 250 applicants in 2002, a rate of 6.2 percent.
For the same year, the ratio was three percent in Germany and two percent for the Netherlands and Sweden, the ministry said.
However, the same figures show a ratio of 45 percent for the United States and 25 percent for Britain.
"Large gaps exist among various nations. But we believe Japan's ratio is in line with that of many other nations," a justice ministry official said.
Misaki Yagishita, a refugee officer at Amnesty International Japan, said the opaque process of the Justice Ministry, which is responsible for both immigration control and protection of refugees, had long been criticised.
She said some people are refused while others in comparable situations are not.
Kazankiran, who originally came to Japan in 1990 and has lived here since 1996 on an expired visa, said the apparent inconsistencies stretched to the Japanese courts as well.
He said the Tokyo District Court ruled last year that he should be granted refugee status after the justice ministry had rejected his application -- only for the decision to be reversed by the Tokyo High Court.
His family has since re-applied.
Yagishita said Kazankiran's situation was typical. "Japan as a whole must improve the quality of the way refugee applications are processed."
She said many asylum-seekers in Japan choose to hide from the authorities, overstay their visas and work illegally.
"They fear that they may be detained and deported if they go to the authorities," she said. "They fear that because that's a real possibility."
Last week, the Asahi Shimbun daily reported claims by human rights groups that immigration officers deport applicants for refugee status while their court cases are still pending.
There are an estimated 250,000 people in Japan whose visas have expired but Tokyo aims to halve that number by 2008.
Japan deported 35,911 foreigners last year, mostly for overstaying their visas, according to the justice ministry.
Such a prospect haunts Erdal Dogan, the 30-year-old father of the other Kurdish family at the Tokyo sit-in.
Dogan, who came to Japan alone in 1999 and was later joined by his wife, brother and his two small children, said he feared Turkish and Japanese authorities were closing in on his family to force them to return to Turkey.
Making a living as a construction worker on a day-to-day basis, he said the home of his relatives in Turkey had been searched by more than a dozen investigators, some of whom were Japanese.
"Why are they doing this to us?" he asked, with Kazankiran acting as interpreter.
The Japanese justice ministry rejected his asylum claim and he took his case to the Tokyo District Court, which is expected to rule on it in a few months.
Dogan said he, too, was part of Kurdish independence movement and that he feared that he would be persecuted if he returned to his homeland.
The justice ministry is to set up a panel of private experts next year to serve as outside advisors for the justice minister when reviewing refugee applications, a ministry official said.
"With that, we hope to respond to the calls to increase the transparency of the process," he said.
Hopefully, that is one of many steps toward improvement, said a Tokyo-based spokeswoman for the UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), which has long urged Japan to accept more refugees.
As for the two Kurdish families staging the sit-in, however, Rika Hakozaki, Tokyo-based spokeswoman for the UNHCR, said: "We have interviewed the families. But the bottom line is it is completely up to the justice ministry."