“It’s much better than going to the West,” reckons Ali, an Uzbek student living in Tokyo. Though negative stereotypes about Islam abound, most Japanese have little first-hand experience of it and remain open-minded. Colleagues at his part-time job accepted his need to pray five times a day, and now even remind him when he is late for his prayers. The people are “so kind”, says Ben Madaliev, who came from Uzbekistan on a scholarship to study business at APU. “ Anzen, anzen,” coo a group of Indonesian fishermen in Tokyo, repeating the Japanese word for “safety” when asked about life in Japan. Muslim migrants appreciate Japan’s security, cleanliness and functionality. That is a shame, Mr Khan says, because Japan is otherwise “a nice place to live”. “They say to me, ‘You’re Japanese, why are you on the side of the Muslims?’” Locals fret about an influx of visitors and the prospect of an Islamic school opening next. Her support for the cemetery prompted a flurry of angry calls and letters. Scientific evidence about the safety of burials goes ignored. Ms Kawabe, in turn, wonders if it is really the water that concerns her compatriots. He wonders why the city does not allow interment in public cemeteries: “If the government isn’t doing it, there must be some problem.” He says he has nothing against the religion, but worries that bacteria will leach into a reservoir close to the planned site. Until the hearings over the cemetery began, he had never met a Muslim. So too did his forebears as far back as he can count, at least four generations. “We won’t be able to drink the water with comfort.” Mr Eto has lived his whole life in a small hamlet of traditional homes and terraced rice paddies.

“It’s not something concrete, just a feeling,” says Mr Eto. The idea of burying bodies strikes many in Hiji as unclean. Will the bodies contaminate the local water supply? Might the corpses fall out of the hillside during an earthquake? But as the start of construction approached, residents of nearby hamlets raised fresh concerns. Time has now run out: the Catholic cemetery is full. Mr Khan says the group has sunk ¥60m-70m ($582,000-679,000) and nearly three years into the project. Talks with the city government went nowhere, but a friendly Buddhist monk helped the BMA find a plot on an uninhabited hillside in Hiji, not far from a Trappist monastery with a disused cemetery. The local Catholic church agreed to share its cemetery while the BMA looked for one of its own. The BMA began searching for a burial ground nearly a decade ago. “If they got Japanese nationality, they should follow Japanese customs and cremate the bodies,” says Eto Kiyotaka, another councillor, who initiated a petition against the cemetery. “A small town can be international and diverse.” Others disagree. “Since they’re Japanese now, we should start understanding who they are and what their culture is,” argues Kawabe Yumiko, a town councillor who supports the cemetery. Some Japanese have embraced their new neighbours, unfamiliar customs and all. The dispute over the cemetery has become a proxy for a broader debate about foreigners’ place in Japanese society. “If I die today, I don’t know where I will be buried,” Mr Khan laments. The BMA has spent years trying to construct one in Hiji, a constellation of hamlets in the hills beyond Beppu, but local resistance has stalled the project.

Most prefectures, including Oita, where Beppu is located, have no Muslim cemeteries. The central government has no system for catering to the needs of foreigners with different customs, in part because foreign workers are seen as visitors rather than permanent migrants.

Some 99% of Japanese are cremated, a practice Islam forbids. Yet while Muslims now have more opportunities to pray, they still struggle to find final resting places.

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