Noriko Calderon’s parents leave Japan
Sarah and Arlan Calderon, illegal immigrants from the Philippines who had hoped the Japanese government would grand them residency visas because their daughter was born in Japan, left the country yesterday after losing their fight against a deportation order:
Meanwhile, Noriko, who has been entrusted to the care of Sarah’s younger sister, said that she is anxious about her life as a whole and school “because it is my first time living apart from my parents.”
“I won’t be able to eat the delicious food my mother cooks,” she said, adding that her parents are “irreplaceable.”
“But it’s not like we’re never going to see each other,” said the teenager, who recently became a second-year student at a junior high school in Warabi, Saitama Prefecture. “I hope I can show them (the next time we meet) that I do my best.”
Earlier in the day, relatives and Arlan’s colleagues gathered at the family’s home in Warabi to bid farewell to the couple.
“We will be waiting for you (to come back),” said construction worker Yasuhisa Nagashima, one of Arlan’s colleagues, adding that it would not be “goodbye.”
Arlan hugged each of his colleagues and thanked them for their kindness.
“Noriko is here, so I hope we can return to her side as soon as possible,” Arlan said, adding that he hoped the day would come when the family would “be able to live quietly together in Japan.”
A fund set up to help provide money for Noriko’s living and educational expenses has already raised 1.58 million yen.
Update: CNN’s Kyung Lah has filed a report about the story:
Noriko Calderon, wearing her school uniform, was being forced to make one of the most wrenching choices of her young life: To stay in the country of her birth rather than join her parents being deported to the Philippines.
The scene was the emotional climax to a story a decade and a half in the making — one that has tugged at heartstrings in Japan, but ultimately failed to sway to an unyielding bureaucracy that activists say violates human rights.
Seeing as the Japanese government didn’t immediately deport them in 2006 and let them remain in the country and plead their case until a special exception was made to permit Noriko to stay in Japan, I hardly see how it is fair to declare that the bureaucracy was “unyielding.” Lah also uses the headline “Schoolgirl told to choose: Country or parents,” when it is clearly Noriko’s parents who had to make the decision of whether to bring their child back to the Philippines.
[hat tip to Keeping Pace in Japan]
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