A few hours after sundown last week, Thi Tu Luong dragged her suitcase down a side street in Tokyo's business district, looking for the temple that would take her in for the night.
TOKYO - A few hours after sundown last week, Thi Tu Luong dragged her suitcase down a side street in Tokyo’s business district, looking for the temple that would take her in for the night.
After a few minutes of walking the street, she saw Jiho Yoshimizu, who runs a support group for Vietnamese workers, waving her in from the entrance of a concrete building. Lured by higher wages but often burdened by debt to recruiters, Vietnamese are the fastest-growing group of foreigners in Japan. They numbered 410,000 in 2019, up 24.5% from the previous year.
“We do everything. We take care of people from when they’re inside the womb to when they’re inside an urn,” said Yoshimizu, who heads the Japan-Vietnam Coexistence Support Group, a nonprofit based out of the temple. In 2019, Yoshimizu handled about 400 cases, but since April that number has spiked. She now receives between 10 and 20 messages a day, all pleas for help from Vietnamese across Japan.
Luong graduated from a vocational school in March and started a job in mid-April at a high-end hotel in Nikko, a tourist destination known for its temples.
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