Vietnamese volunteers prepare food packages and protective masks for the Vietnamese
Tokyo:
A few hours after sunset 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 for the night.
Luong, a 22-year-old Vietnamese woman, had just been laid off from her job in a hotel in a spa town north of Tokyo.
After walking the street for a few minutes, she saw Jiho Yoshimizu, who runs a support group for Vietnamese workers, waving at him from the entrance to a concrete building.
The three-story Buddhist temple, Nisshinkutsu, has become a paradise for young Vietnamese migrant workers, one of the groups hardest hit by the economic crisis that followed the new coronavirus epidemic in Japan.
“I felt abandoned,” said Luong shortly after arriving at the temple. “I’m really grateful to be able to be here.”
Attracted by higher wages but often burdened with debt to recruiters, the Vietnamese are the fastest growing group of foreigners in Japan. They amounted to 410,000 in 2019, up 24.5% compared to the previous year.
In ordinary times, the nuns of the temple offered prayers to the victims, but with the coronavirus disrupting the economy, they now spend their time preparing care packages for the Vietnamese scattered across the country.
Inside the temple, young Vietnamese workers whose lives are in limbo study Japanese, cook Vietnamese food, look for work, or book flights to the house.
“We do everything. We take care of people from the moment they are in the womb to the moment they are in an urn,” said Yoshimizu, who heads the Japan-Vietnam Coexistence Support Group, a non-profit organization profit based outside the temple.
The temple became known to Vietnamese circles after hosting Vietnamese workers who found themselves homeless after the 2011 earthquake in northern Japan.
As Yoshimizu’s reputation spread throughout the community, she began to receive messages from Vietnamese youth – including women seeking abortion, workers who were suddenly dismissed with nowhere to go, and workers fleeing abusive employers. .
In 2019, Yoshimizu treated around 400 cases, but since April, that number has increased. She now receives between 10 and 20 messages a day, all of them calling for help from Vietnamese people across Japan.
“I lost count,” she said, sitting next to a phone that rings and rings endlessly with calls and messages from desperate Vietnamese labor brokers, employers and workers.
“No one else in Japan today can provide this type of support,” she said.
When Luong was dismissed without warning and said to leave her dorm, she turned to Yoshimizu for help.
“I have no job, no place to stay right now. Please help me,” Luong sent Yoshimizu. “Can I come to the temple today?”
Luong graduated from a vocational school in March and started work in mid-April in an upscale hotel in Nikko, a tourist destination known for its temples.
But she said that she had received no work and that she had spent her days in a dormitory doing nothing. Luong said she was paid about 30,000 yen ($ 279.04) in May and was unsure if she was paid in June. A representative of the hotel where she worked told Reuters that they were unable to comment because they did not employ Luong directly.
Many Vietnamese workers arrive in Japan as students or trainees, making them dependent on their employers and therefore vulnerable to abuse and exploitation.
Yoshimizu spoke to parliament last month urging the government to do more to support Vietnamese students who do not have employment insurance.
“Current government policy against coronaviruses aims to help the Japanese first,” said Yoshimizu.
($ 1 = 107.51 yen)
(Reporting by Sakura Murakami; Editing by Stephen Coates and Christian Schmollinger)
(This story has not been edited by GalacticGaming staff and is automatically generated from a syndicated feed.)
