Issue:
April 2025 | Japan Media Review
The far right has seized on sloppy reporting to target Japan’s Kurdish community
The March 3 issue of the tabloid Sankei Sports reported on a group of Kurdish boys from Kawaguchi, Saitama Prefecture, who had recently attended a match at the home stadium of the Urawa Reds soccer team. The boys were asked by Reds staff to leave the stadium after they posed for a picture while holding a banner identifying the local soccer team they belonged to. Stadium management said the action violated its rules against groups displaying banners or signs that did not expressly support the Reds, or wearing uniforms that were not Reds uniforms, a rule the boys also violated because they were wearing their own team uniforms.
The Sankei coverage sparked comments on social media blasting the Kurdish boys for causing trouble. During a discussion of the matter on the web program No Hate TV, freelance journalist Koichi Yasuda, who has extensively covered the issue of Kurdish immigrants in Japan, remarked that Sankei's story was not "newsworthy". This sort of thing happens all the time at soccer games in Japan, almost always involving Japanese supporters of one team or another. In this case, the Kurdish boys are big fans of the Reds since the Reds are essentially their home team, and they wanted a photo to commemorate their attendance. The Sankei story failed to mention that the photo of the banner was not taken during a game, meaning that the boys did not cause any disruption.
"People online just tried to make it look as if the Kurdish boys were troublemakers,” Yasuda said, connecting the incident to the "Kurdish problem" that certain groups have been complaining about with regard to Kurdish immigrants living in Kawaguchi and surrounding areas.
The boys were disappointed and distraught, and explained that they didn't know about the rule and were afraid they would not be able to attend Reds games in the future. Reds staff later allowed the boys to re-enter the stadium and watch the game, however, and said they would invite the team again in the future. Yasuda said that the complaints about the boys on social media came from a small number of individuals, "but they made a lot of noise". When Yasuda asked the Reds organization about these negative online comments, the organization said it had "no control" over hate speech.
This dynamic has come to be the central point of the "Kurdish problem": Right wing media such as the Sankei play up criticism of Kurdish residents in Kawaguchi to the point where it is pretty much the only news the public hears about them. Technically, the Kurds who say they are in Japan to escape persecution in their native Turkey are not refugees because the Japanese government, which has good relations with Turkey, does not acknowledge that the minority Kurds are discriminated against by the Turkish government. Hundreds of Kurds are in Japan on a provisional basis and so could be deported at any time back to Turkey, where they say they would be subject to imprisonment and torture. Kurds who come to Japan for asylum do so because Japan is one of the few countries where Turkish passport holders can travel without a visa, the idea being that once they land, they can request asylum, but Japan has never granted refugee status to anyone who identifies as a Kurd, especially if they are a member of the PKK, the Kurdish Labor Party. The organization has been branded a terrorist organization by Turkey, although peace negotiations between the government and the PKK are ongoing.
This undeclared position by the Japanese government, which is sensitive about its international reputation for being dismissive of refugee applications, was implied by another incident that happened at the end of February, when the Japan Kurdish Cultural Association (JKCA) was scheduled to hold a concert with a Kurdish singer at the Saitama Kaikan. It was cancelled the day before it was due to take place. According to the Saitama Shimbun, the reason was that the singer, Seyda Perinçek, was refused entry to Japan at Narita Airport and had to fly back to Germany, where he lives. Immigration authorities said that Perinçek did not have the proper visa.
A likely reason for the refusal to enter is that, since Perinçek was coming to Japan in order to perform, he would have needed a special work visa, but the JKCA told the newspaper that the Japanese embassy in Germany had told the singer he could travel to Japan for the purpose of performing in a concert without saying anything about a special visa, so it is not clear what the problem was.
The Perinçek affair was also mentioned by the Sankei, which said the matter had been discussed during a lower house budget committee meeting on February 27, when the justice minister, Keisuke Suzuki, was asked by a lawmaker representing Kawaguchi if Perinçek had been refused entry because he didn't have the proper visa. Suzuki said that was indeed the case. The lawmaker then asked if a mistake had been made. Suzuki denied that there had been anything improper about the immigration procedure for Perinçek.
The lawmaker, Hideaki Takahashi of the Nippon Ishin Party, was not trying to put the ministry on the spot. He often complains about the Kurds in his bailiwick, and used the occasion of the Perinçek matter to comment that the singer was a "member of the PKK," a designated terrorist organization in Turkey. That's why Perinçek defected to Germany. Is it also the reason Perinçek was denied entry? Suzuki replied that he was not at liberty to comment on "individual cases". Takahashi later said that he hoped there would be "more questions about Kurds in Japan" during this Diet session.
An earlier Sankei report about the concert quoted the organization that runs public halls in Saitama Prefecture as saying that it was "difficult" to make a decision about whether or not to rent Saitama Kaikan to the JKCA and that it didn't know if the JKCA supports a "terrorist organization". Several media said that the Turkish government had told Japan that both Perinçek and the JKCA belong to the PKK, whose assets are frozen in Turkey.
Yasumichi Noma, the host of No Hate TV, said during a recent broadcast that negative coverage prior to the scheduled date of the concert on social media led to Saitama Kaikan receiving about 50 calls a day demanding that it be called off. The hall decided to go ahead anyway, so Noma wondered if the government had wanted to find another way to get the concert cancelled.
Germany issues travel documents to refugees, even while German immigration is determining resident status. However, to enter Japan, someone from Germany with refugee status must obtain a visa, and that is why Perinçek went to the Japanese embassy beforehand. According to the JKCA, he told the embassy that he wanted to perform in Japan. The embassy said a regular tourist visa would be sufficient. He didn't question this decision because he had performed in other countries after becoming a refugee, including the U.S., with only a tourist visa. But the immigration officer at Narita said it was a problem. Also, the JKCA has held this concert in previous years with other visiting Kurdish musicians who were allowed in.
Although the government has always been coy about its refugee policy, the argument against most immigrants to Japan who ask for asylum is that they are in Japan for economic reasons rather than political ones, meaning that they are here to work and use refugee status as a cover. This argument does not just apply to Kurds. However, Kurdish immigrants are concentrated in and around Kawaguchi and neighboring Warabi, where many work in construction and demolition. Approximately 3,000 Kurds live in the area. In recent years, reports have circulated about problems between Japanese residents and Kurdish residents, especially in the vicinity of construction materials storage areas.
In a report on February 12, the Asahi Shimbun said that the Saitama District Court had awarded a Kurdish immigrant ¥5.5 million after the immigrant sued a man from Kanagawa Prefecture for organizing a "hate speech demonstration" in front of the JKCA office in November, during which the group hoisted banners and used loudspeakers to accuse the association of supporting terrorist suicide attacks. The plaintiff accused the group of defamation and damaging the Kurdish immigrants' relationship with their neighbors. The defendant was prohibited from demonstrating within 600 meters of the JKCA office in November, but were not expressly forbidden from using hate speech. The defendant told the media that he did not accept the ruling.
A lawyer for the JKCA said during the post-ruling press conference that despite these suits and court decisions, hate speech against Kurds has spread and increased in intensity. There are anti-Kurd demonstrations in Kawaguchi practically every week that attract various right-wing elements, including established political parties such as Nippon Hoshuto (Japan Conservative Party) and prominent YouTubers who take advantage of the controversy to boost clicks. As Noma pointed out on No Hate TV, the attention has had a snowball effect of creating buzz about Kurdish immigrants that is essentially negative. This situation is exemplified by Yuusuke Kawaii, a member of Hoshuto who was recently elected to the Toda city assembly based mainly on his performative campaign style. He received national coverage during his unsuccessful runs for the Chiba and Tokyo gubernatorial races while disguised as the Joker from the Batman series. Kawaii's political impetus is basically self-promotion, and his main platform for the Toda election was capitalizing on anti-Kurdish sentiment.
The media's approach to the Kurdish issue was explained by Tamatsu Sugano, a journalist who criticizes both ends of the political spectrum but is best known for the book that first brought public attention to Nippon Kaigi, the right-wing lobbying group to which many prominent Liberal Democratic Party members pledge allegiance. Last September on another web program, Democracy Times, he presented a timeline of Japanese media coverage of Kurds over the last 20 years. Until 2022 the only distinctive coverage came in 2015, when Kurdish militias successfully battled forces of the Islamic State in Syria and a scuffle occurred between Japan-resident Kurds and non-Kurdish Turkish residents outside the Turkish Embassy in Shibuya. As Sugano pointed out, most of the coverage of Kurds in the past was positive because the group was seen as a bulwark against the Islamic State in the Middle East.
That sentiment started to change in 2020, when a Kurdish driver was stopped by police, occasioning accusations of profiling, since it wasn't clear that the driver had been stopped for any reason other than that he looked like a foreigner. The incident sparked demonstrations against the authorities that the JKCA condemned because they were mostly carried out by Japanese left-wing groups whose members reportedly turned violent. However, media outlets incorrectly reported the demonstrations as being "Kurdish", exacerbating anti-foreigner prejudices at large among the public.
Although a film made by a Kurdish resident of Japan, My Small Land, garnered some pro-Kurdish coverage in 2022 and the earthquakes that devastated Kurdish regions in the Middle East sparked sympathy in the Japanese press, in the spring of 2023 there was a spike in stories about "violence” among Kurds in Kawaguchi that Sugano believes was occasioned by a revision to the immigration law that was being discussed in the Diet at the time. The revision would effectively crack down on refugee applicants, making it mandatory for them to be deported after three unsuccessful bids for asylum. Opposition parties in the Diet spoke against the revision, citing discrimination against Kurdish immigrants whose applications for refugee status were being continually refused. Media subsequently went to Kawaguchi to interview Kurds about the revision, which they invariably opposed.
Sugano accused one of the opposition parties, the Constitutional Democratic Party of Japan, of exploiting the Kurds for its own political benefit. He said that once the party had started using Kurds as a tool to make its case against the revision, right-wing groups went to Kawaguchi to demonstrate, insisting that Kurdish refugee applicants be deported because they broke laws and perpetuated violence, accusations that Sugano found no evidence of. Most of the attendant coverage was in the Sankei Shimbun.
The coverage led to a change in attitude toward Kurdish residents. Sugano cited one LDP member of the Kawaguchi city assembly, Seiichi Okutomi, who was initially positive about the many foreigners living in his city, but changed his position in 2023 and started referring to Kurds as a "problem". As the number of likes on his social media accounts increased, probably posted in a concerted manner by right-wing elements, Okutomi became more vociferous in his anti-Kurd statements. "He concluded it was a popular opinion," Sugano said. Eventually, the Kawaguchi assembly passed a resolution demanding closer coverage of the Kurdish problem by the mainstream media and a police crackdown on "some foreigners", especially those committing traffic violations that caused injuries and property damage. According to Sugano, the resolution did not really represent the opinion of local Japanese residents, but was mainly a reflection of the majority LDP's reaction to social media activity.
Last month, the immigration agency announced that about 12,000 people applied for refugee status in 2024. The Sankei focused on Kurdish applicants, saying that the number of foreigners who applied for refugee status "at least twice" as of 2024 totalled 1,355, almost half of whom are Turkish nationals. The newspaper, connecting the data to the revised immigration law that went into effect last year, pointed out that any applicant who is rejected three times is subject to deportation. It cited the case of a Kurdish man who is still living in Kawaguchi whose application had been rejected five times. In a different article, it was suggested the man was running a company under a Japanese name.
The Sankei played down the main thrust of the immigration agency statement, which is that 1,661 people were granted "quasi-refugee" status in 2024. However, all but 43 of the applicants were Ukrainians. No other mainstream media that covered the announcement even mentioned Turks or Kurds, probably because none was approved.
Philip Brasor is a Tokyo-based writer who covers entertainment, the Japanese media, and money issues. He writes the Japan Media Watch column for the Number 1 Shimbun.
Sources
