A Miserly Acceptance Rate
Japan has done less than any other large democracy to alleviate the refugee crisis through granting asylum. That is despite its having acceded in 1981 to the UN Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees and having implemented procedures the following year for handling applications for refugee status. Applicants who obtain refugee status in Japan receive permanent-residence visas and become eligible for the national health and pension programs and for other social welfare assistance. The number of applicants for refugee status in Japan, mainly Asians, has increased sharply since 2010, when Japan began participating in the UNHCR’s refugee resettlement program.
The resettlement program provides for finding permanent homes for persons already residing in refugee camps outside their nation of birth. The UNHCR seeks to achieve peaceful repatriation where possible and long-term accommodation as necessary in refugees’ first-stop sanctuaries. It emphasizes, however, that third-nation resettlement is a crucial complement to those approaches in addressing the refugee crisis.
According to government figures released in March 2015, Japan’s Immigration Bureau received 5,000 applications for refugee status in 2014. That was a surge of 1,740 over the previous year. Unfortunately, the bureau approves only a minuscule percentage of the applications received.
Japan ostensibly adheres in its application-handling procedures to the Refugee Convention’s definition of a refugee: someone who “owing to well-founded fear of being persecuted for reasons of race, religion, nationality, membership of a particular social group or political opinion, is outside the country of his nationality and is unable or, owing to such fear, is unwilling to avail himself of the protection of that country; or who, not having a nationality and being outside the country of his former habitual residence as a result of such events, is unable or, owing to such fear, is unwilling to return to it.” But the Immigration Bureau found only 11, or just 0.2%, of the 5,000 applicants in 2014 to be worthy of recognition and asylum as refugees.