In August 2018 at the age of 19, Le Thi Thuy Linh arrived in Japan from Vietnam to work as a foreign technical intern. Little did she know that she would become a victim of tragedy, then convicted for it as a criminal.
The Yokohama Spring Homeless Patrol offers hope to those in the most desperate need for help within their community.
Former Tokyo Governor Shintaro Ishihara, who died February 1, was an evil man. Any honest obituary would admit as such.
Japanese have long tended to view foreigners as sources of crime within their communities, but in recent years Vietnamese, the nation’s fastest-growing foreign community, have begun to be singled out by rightwing commentators as posing the most serious alleged threat.
Kurt Campbell, the Biden administration’s National Security Council Coordinator for the Indo-Pacific, is the “brain” behind much of what the Pentagon and US State Department are doing in East Asia today, but his policy approaches do not correspond with the realities of a global US empire now in rapid decline.
Calls by business groups and the academic world have increased pressure on Japan to reconsider its overly strict border policies and to reopen the country to essential travelers, but for many of the foreign students who have been desperately trying to enter in Japan for the past two years, the damage has already been done.
Remote work is no longer a remote concept. Since the start of the coronavirus pandemic, we have seen telework, work-from-home, and workations soar in the popular imagination, and indeed become a reality in many lives.
Recent revelations regarding the Japanese government’s purchase of US military drones underlines the East Asian nation’s unwillingness to refuse the “requests” of their US allies as they relate to the acquisition of weapons systems.
A broken rib, a chipped tooth—a worker kicked and beaten frequently over a period of two years. This is not a horror story of a survivor of a Chinese labor camp in Xinjiang, but rather that of a Vietnamese “technical intern” in Okayama, Japan.
US Forces Japan has the duty to recognize that what they do affects Visible Minorities in Japan, whether it be inspiring bigots to slam shop doors in their faces, or giving more ammunition to reactionaries who seek to seal off Japan’s borders.