30,000 foreign students have entered Japan since COVID border curbs eased

Two combini near me have new workers. One is Vietnamese. The other Nepal. Both students, who arrived recently. The Vietnamese has reasonable Japanese, the other has very basic Japanese. I hope they can study hard to communicate, just wonder how much sleep they get.? According to the combini advert, the shift is 10pm to 6am. ¥1165 an hour. I sometimes go there about 12:30am.

Students or is that a euphemism for unskilled labor?

Long overdue.

As a spouse of a Japanese National with family waiting to enter the country this strikes me as being quite unfair on actual tax payers..

100,000!? That is good news for the financially struggling schools.

It will be nice to know where they come from??

30,000 foreign students have entered Japan since COVID border curbs eased

Is it for only foreign students? There be no school and university without students, Japanese university, Japanese language school really wait for this moment.

@Seth

Thats way too many when new variants keeps popping up

Two things. First, these "new" variants are either versions of Omicron or recombinations of variants we already know about - variants the majority of countries are dealing with without issues.

Second, the daily case rate in Japan (that's CASES only, real infection numbers are likely triple these figures) is around 40,000-50,000 a day. Compare those DAILY numbers with 30,000 people over the space of several WEEKS. And on top of all of that, people entering Japan currently are the least likely to be carrying the virus due to the strict testing enforced both before and after arrival. These are some of the safest people in the country you could bump into.

There is absolutely no excuse for the Japanese Government's behaviour re: border restrictions in the current environment.

Weren't all of them supposed to go to "more developed and richer countries" like Vietnam, China, Korea, India et al?!

All the talk about "foreigners" never, ever returning to Japan because of the Covid-19 entry ban?!

Thats way too many when new variants keeps popping up, remote education should be an international norm now!

It's good to be wary of neighbour/s who are not transparent about their covid management, but it's also good to see the government is trying to get as much normality back as possible.

Geographically, Japan is in a very tough place, and it's not helped by so much of its supply chain in China, which entails sponsored travels between China and Japan. When you have CCP media touting low confirmed cases, but explained the definition of confirmed cases, you know the situation is much worse there.

IMO, if Japan is not vigilant, it may well find its economy entering a new wave of covid induced volatility.

Reciprocity was a policy introduced to deal with difficult regimes, Japan may well find it's the only option for dealing with opaque China.

Yes come to learn Japanese language and Japanese culture .

It's a rude awakening for these students.

Meanwhile how many English teachers have been allowed to come teach in Japan ?