It has been a decade since Liliane last saw her little girl. She fled Africa in fear for her life, leaving behind everything she knew and loved in the hope of a fresh start in Japan….
It has been a decade since Liliane last saw her little girl. She fled Africa in fear for her life, leaving behind everything she knew and loved in the hope of a fresh start in Japan. Today, she scrapes a living from dead-end jobs, and what Japanese she knows has been snatched from television shows. There is little government help for people like her: free language courses are limited, social housing is hard to find, discrimination is rife. Yet Liliane is regarded as one of the lucky ones – she was granted refugee status in Japan, a country which refuses more than 99 per cent of cases. “It has not been easy, ” she said, speaking under a pseudonym. She added: “Here they do not pay for your studies, they do not help you to get bank loans, or give you social housing… we are left to ourselves, we have to fight alone.” Anti-refugee sentiment is rising in Europe and the United States but in Japan those seeking haven from tyranny and war have long faced daunting legal and social gauntlets. One of the world’s wealthiest countries, Japan accepted just 28 refugees in 2016 – one more than the previous year – out of the 8,193 applications reviewed by the Immigration Bureau. Officials defend the low number, saying applicants are mainly from Asian countries seeking access to Japan solely for economic reasons. “The number of applications from regions which generate lots of refugees, such as Syria, Afghanistan and Iraq, is small, ” said Yasuhiro Hishida, spokesman for the Immigration Bureau. Assisted by the UN, Liliane was able to claim asylum on arrival in Japan stating that her life was in danger due to tribal conflict back home. It took two years for officials to accept her as a refugee, a period during which she received assistance from the Catholic Church and charities. But she feels the status brought few benefits. She is no closer to reuniting with her child – now a teenager, her daughter has repeatedly been denied a permit to even visit.
