[ad_1]
A 44-year-old Japanese freelance journalist has returned home to an uncertain welcome.
Jumpei Yasuda, who quit his job as reporter on a Japanese newspaper to cover the Iraq war in 2003, arrived in Tokyo on Thursday on a flight from Turkey, rekindling debate in Japan as courageous journalism.
Yasuda surrounded by officials and walking down stairs at Narita airport.
"I am happy that I can return to Japan." At the same time, I must do, "a tired-looking Yasuda told Reuters as he traveled to Istanbul from southern Turkey where he had crossed from Syria after 40 months in captivity.
He was, he added, struggling to speak Japanese.
Japanese government officials had traveled to southern Turkey to confirm his identity. Prime Minister Shinzo Abe thanked the authorities in Turkey and elsewhere for their help in Yasuda.
His capture in Syria was held by activists in the region.
Yasuda traveled to Iraq in late 2002 using his paid leave at the Shinano Mainichi newspaper where he had written about environmental problems, food safety and family issues. Frustrated that his paper would be released in 2003 and in 2004, on another trip to Iraq, was captured by Baghdad by activists, who held him for three days.
In a book he published the same year, he explained that he had undertaken the badignment because he wanted to show the cause caused by the war.
"He could not see faces of people living in the country which was called" an axis of evil "from any information provided by the Japanese media, which only reported diplomatic matters and inspections by the United Nations," he wrote.
Yasuda returned to Iraq in 2007 to work at an Iraqi army training camp and published in Japan about war zone laborers.
Source link
