The tears of joy were impossible to contain Monday for the 8-year-old son of Kurdish asylum-seeker Mehmet Colak, who was released on the day after being detained for 17 months at Tokyo Regional Detention House.
"I feel so splendid. There are so many things I want to tell my dad," said his youngest son, whose name is being kept private by his mother for personal reasons. "I want to go to Disneyland. I want to go camping with my dad."
Colak, 39, arrived in Japan in 2004 after fleeing Turkey. He has filed for refugee status four times but all of those requests have been turned down, the most recent being declined Monday.