Part 3/13:
While Japan has become more accustomed to foreigners—now numbering over 2.8 million as of June 2021—the treatment of some remains problematic. The surge in foreign labor has been especially notable among Vietnamese workers, who constituted about 26% of Japan’s 1.7 million foreign workers as of October 2021. Many arrived under Japan’s Technical Intern Training Program, which was originally designed to transfer skills from Japan to developing countries but has increasingly become a source of cheap manual labor.