Photo/Illutration Local staff members of the Japanese Embassy in Afghanistan and their families arrive at Narita Airport on Oct. 19, 2021. (Takayuki Kakuno)

Japan’s granting of refugee status to Afghans who had worked at the Japanese Embassy in Kabul was hailed as a rare expedited process under the name of humanitarianism.

But those given asylum in August said it came only after their former employer, the Japanese government, signaled it wanted nothing more to do with them and encouraged them to return home.

“I felt that we were not welcome from the outset,” said one of the former local staff members at the embassy.

The government granted refugee status to 98 Afghans who are former embassy workers and their families less than 20 days after their applications were submitted. It usually takes a year or more to complete the screening process.

Supporters said around 40 percent of the Afghans who had fled to Japan last year have returned home, despite the risk of violence from the Taliban, the militant Islamic group now in control of Afghanistan.

Foreign Ministry officials flatly denied that they forced the former embassy staff members to return to Afghanistan. They said they talked with each of them individually, and they made their own decisions about their futures.

The officials declined to divulge details of such conversations. They also said they could not confirm how many of them returned to their home country.

LEFT BEHIND

The Foreign Ministry airlifted Japanese workers at the embassy in Kabul out of Afghanistan after the Taliban occupied the capital in August 2021.

But local staff members were left behind, despite the dangers that the Taliban could view them as collaborators with a foreign country.

Only in October that year, the Afghan staff members and their families, totaling around 170 people, were flown to Japan.

According to multiple sources, including former embassy staff, during their stay at an accommodation facility in Tokyo, Foreign Ministry officials repeatedly summoned them individually for talks.

The officials repeatedly asked them what they intended to do, and the tone was often one of discouragement, the sources said.

“Your life in Japan will be hellish,” the sources quoted the officials as saying. “You can’t get a job here unless you speak Japanese.”

Although the ministry officials said they would not force them to return to Afghanistan, they told some of them that “you’d better go back to your country,” according to sources. 

In spring this year, they received a notice that their employment contract with the embassy would be terminated in August.

They were also told that they would need to find a job and a place to live on their own if they wanted to stay in Japan.

Some of them chose to leave Japan.

The supporters said one former embassy employee became mentally distressed in Japan and returned to Afghanistan in July, rejecting advice to stay here away from the Taliban.

At the end of July, with only one month left on the employment contract, the Foreign Ministry gave the remaining embassy staff members in Japan documents to apply for refugee status.

“The government could have let them apply for refugee status earlier,” Mitsuru Nanba, a lawyer who supports the former embassy workers, said. “It is clear that the Foreign Ministry never assumed that they wanted to settle in Japan.”

One former local staff member was reluctant to speak out about the matter, saying, “I don’t want to be singled out by the Foreign Ministry because I want to bring my family to Japan.”

But the former worker could not hide the disappointment about the Japanese government.

“We kept working for Japan even when we almost died in an explosion near the embassy,” the former staff member said. “The Japanese government could have helped us more.”

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