Myanmar's Foreign Minister Wunna Maung Lwin, right, is welcomed by Japanese Chief Cabinet Secretary Osamu Fujimura at the Japanese prime minister's official residence in Tokyo on Thursday Oct. 20, 2011. (AP Photo/Toshifumi Kitamura, Pool)

TOKYO (Kyodo) -- A 46-year-old Myanmar refugee who came to Japan from a camp in Thailand on a U.N.-promoted third country resettlement program a year ago muttered at a recent press conference, "To be honest, I'm not happy that I came to Japan."

His comments brought to light some of the issues the Japanese government and civil society must tackle in helping such refugees integrate into Japan, which has received high expectations around the world for being the first Asian country to introduce the program.

Experts say that considerable improvement is needed for the current government-funded six-month support program, to which the refugees enroll once arriving in Japan, saying that the program's Japanese language study portion, held among other lectures on Japanese social systems and practices, is not enough to empower the refugees to live on their own.

They also urge more involvement by local people and communities to help the refugees settle in, a crucial factor for a successful resettlement as shown in a report by the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees on the third-country resettlement program.

The refugee, who is a father of three children and who spoke at the press conference in late September about the problems he encountered, was among 27 refugees from five ethnic Karen families who came to Japan in September last year under the three-year pilot program, in which Japan aims to receive a total of 90 refugees.

The second batch of 18 refugees from four ethnic Karen families arrived in Japan a day after the man's press conference and have begun their lives in Japan, enrolled in the same six-month support program that the first group went through in Tokyo before being sent to Mie and Chiba prefectures to settle.

Speaking at a symposium in October, the 46-year-old man said his life in Yachimata, Chiba Prefecture, where he and his wife underwent vocational training at a farm following the six-month support program was not what he had expected back in Thailand's Mera camp or what he had been told.

He did not expect that it would take his 17-year-old son about two-and-a-half hours to commute to and from his junior high school, an evening school, nor did he expect that he and his wife would need to work more than 10 hours a day, sometimes on Saturdays and from as early as 4 a.m., with monthly pay capped at around 120,000 yen per person.

As a result, his family and the other family in Chiba have refused to work for the farm and are looking for jobs in Tokyo.

"I'm grateful to the Japanese government for accepting us, but as I am not so young, I'm concerned about my children," the man said at the symposium held in Tokyo.

"I want them to be people who can be nice to other people. To that end, they need to receive education in a safe environment," he said.

He added that his family feels lonely and isolated due to a lack of support organizations close by and also because the other refugee family in Chiba lived far away from them.

The two families in Chiba have claimed that they were barred from installing telephone, fax or Internet lines at their homes, according to lawyers representing the refugees.

Yumiko Endo, who has a long career in teaching Japanese to foreign students, said that picking up the Japanese language is a prerequisite in attaining comfortable living conditions in Japan.

"It requires a concentrated training period to learn Japanese. About two years is appropriate," said Endo, head of the Shibuya and Shinjuku schools of Arc Academy, a Japanese language school.

Masaharu Nakagawa, Japan's minister of education, culture, sports, science and technology, also admitted at the symposium that the six-month period is insufficient, saying, "There should be an opportunity where the refugees can continue their language lessons even if they get employment."

Aside from the language problem, Saburo Takizawa, a former UNHCR representative in Japan and a professor at Toyo Eiwa University, points out that nongovernmental organizations, local municipalities and schools should all get involved to create an environment in which the refugees can get settled.

"We cannot just point fingers at the government and expect them to act. The NGOs and the local people are the only ones who can connect the refugees to the local community," he said.

Takizawa, a leading member of a citizens' group in Matsumoto, Nagano Prefecture, has recently succeeded in garnering the support of the Matsumoto municipal government and a major local-based agricultural corporation to work together to formulate concrete measures to help receive refugees.

The group is working on providing housing, jobs and Japanese language training to receive in Matsumoto some families from the second group of refugees that arrived in September.

"Our group is a unique, citizen-initiated project that aims to help refugees integrate into the local community," Takizawa said. "Those who will receive and those who will be received both have worries. I hope that the locals become united to help the refugees." (Mainichi Japan) November 3, 2011 (http://mdn.mainichi.jp)

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