Document #1150191
IRB – Immigration and Refugee Board of Canada (Author)
The only reference to Iranian refugee
claimants in Japan found among the sources currently available to
the IRBDC is a brief statement in the UNHCR's magazine
Refugees of February 1988 (p. 37) stating that at that time
a few Iranian cases were pending (although no figure is given, a
total of 117 non-Asian pending refugee claims is quoted for Japan,
of which most are said to be of other non-Iranian
nationalities).
An officer of the UNHCR mission in Canada,
as stated on 16 March 1990, stated that the only information
available to the office on the subject was a statement made by a
visiting Japanese reporter of the Asahi Shinbum newspaper, who
commented that an Iranian refugee claimant rejected by Japan had
arrived to Vancouver.
The publications World Refugee Report
1988 (U.S. Department of State, p. 98) and World Refugee
Survey 1988 (U.S. Committee for Refugees, p. 33) report that
nearly 600 refugees, although all of them Vietnamese, had settled
in Japan. An officer of the UNHCR mission in Canada confirmed that
Japan had accepted a few hundred Vietnamese refugees.
Although various sources report that a
degree of discrimination against minorities exists within the
Japanese society, [ For example, "[Prime Minister] Nakasone's
no-minorities remark angers Japan's Ainu", in The Globe and
Mail, 23 October 1986.] there are no reports currently
available to the IRBDC indicating that this affects the treatment
of refugee claimants in Japan.
For a critical report on Japan's refugee
determination system which comments on Japan's treatment of refugee
claimants regardless of their nationality, please find attached a
copy of "Present Status and Problems of Refugee Status Recognition
System" by Kazuo Ito, Chairman of the Committee on Management of
Legal Aid to Refugees of Japan, Tokyo. Please note that the
document is not dated, so the IRBDC cannot ascertain what year it
was prepared. The IRBDC copy of the document was sent by the Legal
Aid to Refugees of Japan to the IRBDC on June 1989.