Nation should take measures 'to align itself with the international community'

Hitoshi Kino, a bespectacled clerical employee at a university near Tokyo, doesn't stand out.

Only a slight Vietnamese accent betrays his past, as he speaks in Japanese about being stranded on a rickety boat in waters off his war-torn homeland in 1980, starving with 32 others and left by pirates with nothing but his underpants.