15 Sep Japan opens door to temporary foreign workers

Clerking in a convenience store is a rite of passage for many Japanese university students: the classic part-time job. At retail group Lawson’s training centres, young recruits learn polite phrases to greet customers, before fanning out to its thousands of stores across Japan.

But there is something different about its recent recruits. They are not Japanese but Vietnamese, and their training takes place not in Tokyo but in Hanoi or Ho Chi Minh City, about a month before they set off to study at universities in Japan.