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Japan rejected 99 percent of refugees in 2015
Justice ministry says it accepted 27 asylum seekers out of record 7,586 applications last year.
Japan rejected 99 per cent of asylum applications last year, accepting only 27 refugees, government figures have shown.
The country's justice ministry said on Saturday it received a record 7,586 asylum applications in 2015, up 50 percent compared to the year before.
Asylum seekers from Nepal topped the list of those arriving in 2015, with 1,768 submissions.
The accepted applicants included six from Afghanistan, three Syrians, three Ethiopians and three Sri Lankans.
Calls for swift action
Japan, which faces a demographic problem due to an ageing population and declining birthrates, is the world's third largest economy and runs the tightest refugee recognition system among industrialised economies.
In 2014, it granted refugee status to just 11 people, out of 5,000 applicants
Saori Fujita, an official for the Immigration Bureau of Japan, was quoted by the Japan Times website as saying that 2015's increase was due to a rise in the number of Indonesian applicants.
Fujita said 17 Indonesians applied in 2014, compared to 969 last year.
The Japan Association for Refugees said despite the progress in recent years, more applicants should be accepted.
"We hope that (Japan) will hold discussions with UNHCR and NGOs and swiftly consider measures to certify refugees in line with international standards," it said.
Japan’s Refugee Recognition Act does not include war refugees in its narrow interpretation of the International Refugee Convention.
On Wednesday, Japan's parliament approved $350m in humanitarian aid for Syrian and Iraqi refugees, which is to complement a $810m package approved last year, according to Deutsche Welle.
Asked by reporters at the UN General Assembly last September whether Japan would join other countries in accepting Syrian refugees, Prime Minister Shinzo Abe replied that his country needed to boost its own workforce first by empowering more women and older people to work.
"As an issue of demography, I would say that before accepting immigrants or refugees, we need to have more activities by women, by elderly people and we must raise [the] birthrate," he said, according to the official translation of his comments.
"There are many things that we should do before accepting immigrants."
Source: Al Jazeera and agencies
Japan nuclear mess: They really have no idea
After weeks of government assurances that everything is under control and there is nothing to worry about, recent events at the damaged Japanes Fukushima Dai-ichi nuclear reactors have revealed the truth: They really have no idea what’s going on inside there.
If there’s one lesson we can gain from this odyssey, it’s that nuclear reactors are perfectly safe… so long as nothing goes wrong.
How did they discover the latest leakage?
Not from external monitoring equipment. Not by measuring radioactivity inside.
By radiation burns on the feet of workers. By sticking people in there and seeing if they got hurt.
Things that can go wrong
It’s two weeks since the quake, and they are only just now getting the power connected back up to the plant. And as MIT professor Michael W. Golay tells the LA Times, it’s only after the power comes back on that we’ll learn what equipment, including instruments and controls, still works and which got smashed.
Let’s reiterate. What we have here is a nuclear power plant: an incredibly high-tech device that is spectacularly dangerous. We have been assured that everything conceivable has been done to make it safe.
And right now the only thing being done to keep it from melting down and contaminating thousands of square miles with radioactive poisons, rendering them uninhabitable for years, is “Get water into the reactor buildings to stabilize hot fuel rods.”
Water pumped in through holes in the roof by fire trucks.
And the only way they found out that radioactive water is leaking from the reactors is the equivalent of sending someone in there to stick their toe in the water to see if it’s hot.
Evening at the improv
“The operators are having to do a lot of improvisation to figure out what best to do to keep the amount of radiation being released into the atmosphere to a minimum,” nuclear engineering expert Elmer Lewis, a professor emeritus at Northwestern University, told MSNBC’s science editor, Alan Boyle.
“Improvisation” is not really a word you want to hear in this context. In the context of nuclear power, one doesn’t want to hear about monitor and control systems that stop working when there is a disaster. “During a disaster” is precisely the time you NEED monitor and control systems.
If the monitor and control systems can stop working during a disaster, then all the reassurances being handed out by allies of the nuclear industry about how safe it is… are completely worthless.
Think it couldn’t happen here? There are five reactors that share an identical design with the Fukushima reactors, and 17 more that are similar, out of the 104 nuclear power plants in the US. Many of them – like the Diablo Canyon plant in California – are in major earthquake zones.
The real danger
There is a very good chance that the reactor vessel has been breached, spilling radioactive water into the the facility. From there, it will leak out into the air and into the water. Keep in mind that this nuclear reactor sits on the ocean. ALL nuclear reactors sit on oceans and rivers – they need the water for cooling. Unfortunately, that means if there’s an accident, our water supply is contaminated.
It’s already hard enough for workers to get in there to try to fix things. With more radiation inside the building, the workers have had to pull back.
Which means… god only knows what.
Thomas Kauffman, who was a plant systems operator at Three Mile Island during the meltdown there, told the LA Times that they had things pretty much under control by the end of day one.
“We had our electrical supplies, we had our roads, we had our backup systems functioning,” he said. “It’s quite a different story in Japan.”
And that’s the problem. It sure looks like nuclear reactors are perfectly safe… as long as everything is fine. God help us when something goes wrong.
MSNBC’s Boyle says
Virtually all the experts are dismayed that the plant still hasn’t been brought under control. “There’s still too much energy coming out of that fuel to walk away,” [Princeton physicist Frank] von Hippel said. “They still have to keep trying to cool it. The problem is that we’re now two weeks after the accident started, and they don’t have a handle on the situation yet.”
font redaction http://redgreenandblue.org/2011/03/25/japan-nuclear-mess-they-really-have-no-idea
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