Japanese officials reach out to Kurdish immigrant community from Turkey 2021/01/01 18:21
Ethnic Kurds living in Japan accompany a local police patrol in the city of Kawaguchi. (Photo: Vakkas Colak).
ERBIL (Kurdistan 24) - A police station in a city outside Tokyo has reached out to the local Kurdish community from Turkey by publishing newspapers for free in the Turkish language.
Japan has a small community of around 2,500 Kurds, most of them since the 1990s when hundreds of Kurds from the Middle Eastern nation fled there.
In this period, a decade of Turkish-led violence marked by extrajudicial killings, disappearances, and the depopulation of thousands of villages in Kurdish-majority provinces of the country during fighting between the military and the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) led to thousands of Kurds moving abroad.