It is well-known that a growing number of foreigners have arrived to reside in
Japan in the past decade, and one of the fastest growing populations is the
Vietnamese. While many of them have come as technical trainees, they are not the
only Vietnamese people in Japan. In fact, there are refugees who arrived in the last
century during and after the Vietnam War, family members of the refugees who came
recently, and also people who entered Japan as students and have stayed to work in
the country. This paper introduces different cases of Vietnamese residents in Japan
and shows their diversity. Each of the Vietnamese presented in this paper has
his/her own backgrounds, lives under different situations, has his/her own problems
peculiar to the situations, and has own values. The paper argues that not
acknowledging this type of diversity is one of the major problems in Japanese
discourse on foreign residents. Foreigners are often regarded as if they are all same,
constituting one social group, rather than a group of diverse people. People often
comment that growing number of foreigners might result in less secure society, or less
jobs for the Japanese, but the diversity of the Vietnamese people presented in this
paper shows that it is too simplistic to frame all Vietnamese people as “Vietnamese in
Japan” or all foreign workers as “foreigners”, and that various social problems cannot
be simply seen as “Japanese vs. foreigners.” Rather, the paper suggests, in the age
when foreign residents are increasing rapidly and Japan is faced with the challenge of
building a kyosei society in the real sense, that it is important to look at each
different situation and act and solve problems according to the case.
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