THE ASAHI SHIMBUN
January 30, 2021 at 14:40 JST
About 70 percent of workers at this plant in Zama, Kanagawa Prefecture, were born overseas. (Asahi Shimbun file photo)
A record 1,724,328 foreign nationals worked in Japan in 2020 in spite of the COVID-19 pandemic.
The figure as of the end of October represented an increase of about 65,000 from the same period a year earlier, according to the Health, Labor and Welfare Ministry.
It was also marked the eighth straight year for a record number of foreign workers.
But the COVID-19 crisis did have some effect as the year-on-year increase was 4 percent, compared with the 13.6 percent increase recorded in 2019.
For the first time, Vietnam accounted for the largest number of foreign workers with 443,998, while China followed with 419,431 and the Philippines with 184,750.
There were 402,355 foreign technical intern trainees in Japan last year, an increase of 4.8 percent over the previous year.
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