Hla Aye Maung's nightmare began in the central Tokyo district of Nishi Nippori when he went shopping. A police car pulled up beside him and the officers found he was one of the more than 250,000 illegal aliens apparently working in Japan. They took him to a police station in nearby Ueno, from where he got word to his wife. Through the Burmese community network, a lawyer was contacted and thus began his odyssey as an asylum-seeker.

He filed his application while in the Shinagawa detention center, before he was moved to Ushiku Detention Center in Ibaraki Prefecture — usually the last stop before deportation. Virtually every asylum-seeker knows Ushiku, a name that conjures up things we all fear but which is terra incognita for almost all Japanese. Hla Aye, 40, spent 18 months in detention, and is out now on 300,000 yen bail.

Like many asylum-seekers, his case dragged on. The Immig- ration Bureau turned him down and his appeal was denied by the Justice Ministry. He was told that as an Arakanese he did not fit the 1951 U.N. Convention on Refugees' criteria for persecution, because the U.S. State Department's Human Rights report on Myanmar did not list this as an ethnic group targeted by the military junta.