Vietnamese population in Japan quadruples over five years: report

The Vietnamese expat population in Japan increased by four times from 2012-2016 and reached 232,562 in June 2017, the Japan Times cited Japanese magazine Weekly Playboy as saying.

Vietnam has surpassed Brazil to become the fourth biggest minority group in Japan, the magazine said, predicting that Vietnam may soon overtake the Philippines to take third place.

The number of Vietnamese students in Japan grew more than 12-fold during the same period to around 54,000, Bloomberg cited the Japan Student Services Organization (JASSO) as saying in a report last year.

They accounted for nearly a quarter of international students in Japan, just behind Chinese students who made up 41 percent.

The growing presence of Japanese companies in Vietnam has students and their parents thinking about studying in Japan in the hope of landing a well-paid job with a Japanese company, Itsuro Tsutsumi, director at JASSO’s student-exchange department, told Bloomberg.

Yet there is a dark side to this trend, and Weekly Playboy makes it very clear when noting that Vietnamese nationals are already Japan’s main criminal minority, responsible for 2,556 violations during 2015, exceeding the 2,390 violations committed by Chinese migrants.

A police interpreter in the Chubu region of Japan told Japan Times that around half of Vietnamese trainees and students are not able to afford their tuition fees and drop out of school to turn to a life of crime.

Data from the Pew Research Center, a U.S.-based non-partisan think tank, shows that Japan was among the top ten hosts of Vietnamese migrants in 2017.