A 44-year-old Japanese freelance journalist returned home yesterday to an uncertain welcome more than three years after militants in Syria captured and held him in what he described as a physical and mental “hell.”
Jumpei Yasuda, who quit his job as a reporter on a Japanese newspaper to cover the Iraq war in 2003, arrived in Tokyo on a flight from Turkey, rekindling debate in Japan about reporting from war zones that some see as reckless adventurism and others as courageous journalism.
Television footage showed a gaunt-looking Yasuda surrounded by officials and walking down stairs to a waiting car at Narita International Airport.
Photo: Reuters
“I am happy that I can return to Japan. At the same time, I don’t know what will happen from here or what I should do,” a tired-looking Yasuda told reporters as he traveled to Istanbul from southern Turkey where he had crossed from Syria after 40 months in captivity.
He was struggling to speak Japanese, he added.
His capture in Syria was not the first time he has been held by militants in the region.
Yasuda travelled to Iraq in late 2002 using his paid leave at the Shinano Mainichi Shimbun.
Frustrated that his paper would not send him on assignment there, he quit in 2003 and in 2004, on another trip to Iraq, was captured by militants, who held him for three days.
In a book he published the same year, he said that he had undertaken the assignment because he wanted to show the suffering caused by the war.
Yasuda returned to Iraq in 2007 to work as a cook at an Iraqi army training camp and in 2010 published a book in Japan about war zone laborers.
His last trip to the region was in 2015. Apart from a few brief videos released by his captors, little is known about what happened to him after he disappeared.
“There was bashing before and it appears it is already happening this time,” freelance journalist Kosuke Tsuneoka, a friend of Yasuda, said in a telephone interview. “Yasuda is tough and has great mental strength. I’m not worried he will be hurt.”
The criticism could make it difficult for journalists to cover the region in future, said Yoshihiro Kando, a former Asahi Shimbun reporter.
“I am worried that the atmosphere becomes such that one should not go because it is dangerous and the trend is toward self-restraint,” he wrote on the Web site for the Association of Japanese Journalists Working in Dangerous Areas.
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