On a chilly afternoon in mid-January, more than 30 Kurdish asylum-seekers gathered in front of United Nations University in Tokyo's Shibuya Ward to call for U.N. action on Turkey's continued all-out attacks on Kurds in the northern Syrian town of Afrin.
Addressing bystanders through a megaphone was Eyyup Kurt, a 30-year-old Kurdish journalist who fled from Turkey to Japan in 2015 fearing persecution over his reports on corruption scandals involving family members of Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan.
"I could have been arrested at any moment, so I fled to Japan because this country allows entry to Turkish passport-holders without visas," Kurt said. To go to Canada, his first choice, he would have needed a visa.