A Japanese refugee. It sounds like an oxymoron, but it’s not. In fact, the Office of the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees reports that dozens of Japanese citizens receive refugee status around the world every year.
And one recent case has generated headlines. Two Japanese women have received refugee status in Canada due to discrimination they faced in Japan.
In the hilariously old-fashioned wording of the Asahi Shimbun’s English edition, the discrimination they faced was to be being “lesbians and members of the weaker sex.”
Campaigners and advocates like to the lack of Christian moralism for Japan’s rich queer history. In general, queer people have not faced the same kind of oppression historically. But that kind of tolerance to different than the more concrete, legal freedoms that their counterparts enjoy in other parts of the world (perhaps precisely because those countries so horrifically oppressed gay people in the past). Same-sex marriage, for instance, has received de facto recognition by local governments but efforts to get the central government to enshrine it formally in law have gone nowhere, and relatively few members of public life — from politics to entertainment, sport, or academia — are openly gay.
Canadian immigration authorities made the unusual step of granting refugee status to the women because Japan does not offer legal marriage for same-sex couples “noting the couple was denied the benefits given under the Japanese system to those in opposite-sex marriages” and that the two women feared persecution back home in Japan.
The move has sparked a lot of media attention in Japan over the past few days.
The women — Eri in her thirties and Hana in her fifties — moved to Canada in 2021 after struggling with discrimination in “community and in their workplaces.” They initially had student visas but applied for refugee status as a way of receiving permanent residence in the country.
To obtain refugee status, they submitted a 200-page document about the situation in Japan regarding gay rights and same-sex marriage. The authorities then held interviews and public hearings to determine if the couple should be accepted as refugees.
The authorities’ statement notifying the women of their refugee status claimed that discrimination was widespread in Japan, and that the rights of women and sexual minorities did not adequate protection in Japan.
The case became news after the two women went public in a bid to boost awareness of the issue back in Japan. While polls usually show that the ordinary public have no issue with gay people and support marriage equality, these women have attracted a backlash online from right-wing netizens, who are always very prickly about anything that is construed as criticism of their country, especially from abroad.
