Foreigners bid to stay in Japan:

Dozens of foreigners seeking permission to stay in Japan have staged a hunger strike while in detention, highlighting what human rights advocates say is shoddy treatment of foreigners here.

Supporter Mitsuru Miyasako told reporters Thursday many had been recruited to work in Japan during the “bubble economy” about 30 years ago but are now being told to go home.

None has been charged with a crime. About half are seeking refugee status, although only about 0.3 percent of such applicants are awarded asylum in Japan. Many have had children in the country.

The hunger strike, which started May 9 with 22 people in a Tokyo immigration detention center, expanded to 70 people there. Thirty people in another city joined. It ended Tuesday because they were suffering health problems and had “reached their limit,” Miyasako said.

During the initial days of the hunger strike, some people didn’t even drink water, and three — from China, Nigeria

and Bangladesh — became unconscious and were hospitalized, Miyasako said in a news conference at the Foreign Correspondents’ Club of Tokyo. They have

Indonesian policemen carry the coffin of police officer Imam Gilang Adinata who was killed late on May 24 in a suicide bombing, during a memorial ceremony in Jakarta on May 25. (AFP)

since recovered. (AP)