Mar 23 (Japan Times) - The number of foreign residents in Japan had risen 6.6 percent at the end of 2018 from a year earlier, to reach a record high of some 2.73 million, Justice Ministry data showed on Friday.
The increase in foreign students and technical trainee visa holders, especially from Vietnam, contributed to the overall growth, an official with the ministry’s Immigration Bureau said.
As of the end of last year, 337,000 non-Japanese were registered as students and another 328,360 were technical interns who had come to Japan under government-sponsored programs — each figure up nearly 20 percent from a year earlier, the official said.
Vietnamese, comprising 330,835 residents as of late December, saw the highest growth, up 26.1 percent from a year earlier.
“In case of Vietnamese residents in particular, this tendency is owing to strong growth in the number of technical trainees and those who come to work as engineers or specialists in humanities,†the official said.
Of the foreign nationals in the nation, who hail from 195 countries and regions, the Vietnamese community ranked the third-largest group after Chinese residents at 764,720 and South Koreans at 449,634. In addition, Indonesians and Nepalese, also in the top 10, were among the top three strongest growing communities in the past year.
As many as 2.4 million foreigners living in Japan were mid- and long-term residents.
