FEATURE: Daughter of refugee strives to build Japanese school in Vietnam

January 18, 2017

TOKYO- The child of a refugee from Vietnam is striving to realize her dream of building a Japanese language school in the Southeast Asian country.

"My dream is to do something that would serve as a bridge between Japan and Vietnam," said Doan Thy Trang, 27.

To achieve that goal, she founded a consulting firm in Akashi, a western Japanese city facing the Seto Inland Sea, in January 2015.

Trang explained that many business trainees from Vietnam she meets through her work have little difficulty communicating with Japanese in daily conversations but struggle with technical terms.

"Vietnamese need a school that teaches them Japanese language used in workplaces," she said.

Trang moved to Japan in 2005 with her mother and elder sister to join their father, who had fled Vietnam about 15 years earlier and obtained refugee status from the Japanese government. She made Akashi, Hyogo Prefecture, her new home as her father settled there.

She refused to speak in detail about her parents who were both teachers in Vietnam, indicating she feared relatives could still face political persecution in their home country.

Back home, Trang was always one of the brightest students at junior high school and was especially good at mathematics and English.

But in Japan, she faced a language barrier. Before entering a local junior high school, she studied Japanese for six months at a facility set up in Tokyo's Shinagawa Ward to support refugees. However, she could not answer questions at all in her first tests at the school.

"I didn't even understand what the questions meant," Trang said of the tests.

Despite a host of challenges including cultural differences and discrimination. Kazuya Iwamura, Kyodo News