Teenagers gathered one weekday evening at an old two-story building next to a housing project in a Yokohama suburb.

It had been nearly three years since volunteer worker Hideki Hayakawa and his staff, mainly college students, had opened the "multicultural studio," extending support to local junior high and high school students with non-Japanese cultural backgrounds.

Kanagawa Prefecture is home to about one-third of the Indochinese who have settled in Japan since the late 1970s.