Hundreds of Myanmar prodemocracy activists living in Japan long for the day when a democratic government is established in their home country.
Soe Win, 47, editor-in-chief of the Erawan Journal, a Burmese-language magazine published in Tokyo, is one of them.
"I and my friends thought we could go back to Burma (Myanmar) soon after (prodemocracy leader) Aung San Suu Kyi and her National League for Democracy won a landslide victory in the 1990 general election," he said at his apartment in Tokyo, where he lives with his family and edits the monthly magazine for the Myanmar community in Japan.
Twelve years later, though, their wish to go home still has not come true as the junta did not allow the NLD to form a democratic government based on the election results.Like many other prodemocracy activists, Soe Win left his country to escape political persecution at the hands of the military government.
Soe Win was arrested when he joined an antijunta demonstration in Yangon in 1973. After a 15-minute trial, he was sentenced to seven years in prison. Though he was freed after three years as part of an amnesty, Soe Win was not allowed to return to university.
When prodemocracy movements spread around the country in 1988, his parents managed to obtain a passport for Soe Win on the black market and sent him to neighboring Thailand because they feared that their son could be killed if he was involved in a demonstration and arrested again.
"At that time, I was still optimistic and believed I needed to spend only a few months in Thailand because the formation of a democratic government looked so imminent in Burma," he said.He was wrong, however. After staying in Thailand for nine months, he decided to move to Japan. "I chose Japan as my destination just because it was one of the five countries I could enter with a Burmese passport in those days and could obtain a short-term visa," he said.
Soe Win continued a prodemocracy campaign with his friends in Tokyo, while working at a photo lab. In 1994, he decided to launch the Erawan Journal. The Myanmar community in Japan, which grew due to an exodus of young people after 1988, did not have a community magazine yet, though Chinese and Philippine communities already had their own newspapers and magazines, he said.At the beginning, the Erawan Journal was published biweekly with only eight pages printed in two colors.
"Nonetheless, the magazine quickly won popularity because it was filled with information Burmese residents in Japan longed for," said Hisao Tanabe, an expert on the Burmese language who is familiar with the Myanmar community in Japan.
Tanabe, senior program director of the News and Program Production Center at NHK's International Planning and Broadcasting Department, said that the magazine carried articles on the political and economic situation in Myanmar as well as news on immigration policy, education, social welfare and health care in Japan.
In the eight years since its inauguration, the Erawan Journal has gone monthly and is now printed in four colors. The number of pages has increased to 36 and the circulation climbed from 1,000 copies per issue in 1994 to 3,000 in 2002.
The Justice Ministry's Immigration Bureau said that the total number of Myanmar nationals now living in Japan is unknown, but Tanabe and others familiar with the community speculate that the figure is somewhere between 5,000 and 10,000. They think about 80 percent of them are living in Tokyo. According to the bureau's statistics as of Jan. 1, there were 4,177 Myanmar nationals staying in Japan beyond the expiration of their visas.
In the Myanmar community today, prodemocracy activists number only 200 or 300, Shogo Watanabe, a member of the Lawyers' Group for Burmese Refugee Applicants in Japan, said.
"This figure may look very small at first glance," said the lawyer, who has been helping Burmese refugee applicants on a pro bono basis since 1992. "But, the fact is that more than a half of the foreigners the Japanese government has recognized as refugees in recent years have been Burmese."
With Watanabe's help, Soe Win was granted refugee status in 1998.He now earns his living publishing the Erawan Journal, thanks to the income from an average of 60 advertisements in every issue.
The advertisements reflect a vibrant Myanmar community here--restaurants, karaoke bars, convenience stores, barber shops, beauty salons, travel agencies, photo shops and Buddhist temples. The ads also indicate that most of them are located in places convenient to central Tokyo but where rents are relatively cheap, such as near Takadanobaba, Okubo, Shin-Okubo and Otsuka stations in Tokyo.
"In contrast to those who arrived in Japan for political reasons, most Burmese coming to Japan today do so to make money because the Burmese economy is in a crisis due to the misgovernment of the junta," said Nyunt Swe, a prodemocracy activist and owner of Nagani, a Burmese restaurant in Takadanobaba, Shinjuku Ward, Tokyo.
"Those Burmese have to work very hard to recover the 1.4 million yen to 1.5 million yen each of them paid to brokers in Burma to get passports and other necessary documents to come to Japan," he added.With the success of the Erawan Journal, Soe Win has achieved a reasonable standard of living in Japan, but his dream as a journalist remains incomplete until he can go back to his homeland.
"Like many of my fellow activists, I would like to go back to Burma as soon as a democratic government is established there," Soe Win said. "I want to work as a journalist there. The Burmese public now has access only to censored media since the country is under the control of the junta. However, once democracy is established there, a huge number of free media outlets must be born."