A leader of a global network of activists for Rohingya Muslims on Thursday called on Japan to actively speak out against the alleged abuse and genocide against Myanmar's ethnic minority by the country's military and strongly criticized Tokyo for its relative silence on a crisis that has become a major international concern.

"There are 400 villages burned to the ground ... Japan cannot be so out of line from the reality. Rohingyas are treated as guilty (just) because they exist," Maung Zarni, leader of the Free Rohingya Coalition, said at a news conference at the Foreign Correspondents' Club of Japan in Tokyo.

Around 723,000 Rohingya people fled to neighboring Bangladesh in the year after violence broke out in the Rakhine state in the Buddhist-majority country in August 2017, according to the UNHCR, the U.N.'s refugee agency. More than 40 percent of them were under age 12.