Eighteen refugees from Myanmar arrived Tuesday in Japan from Thailand, their country of asylum, under the U.N.-promoted third country resettlement program, marking a new phase in Japan's refugee policy that is often labeled as too restrictive.
The members of three ethnic Karen families are the first group to arrive following the government's 2008 decision to accept about 90 refugees over three years under a pilot program, which Tokyo says is the first of its kind in Asia.
Twenty-seven Myanmar refugees consisting of five families were scheduled to arrive Tuesday, but nine from two families postponed their departure after two children among them developed a fever.