When it came to light in March that a Vietnamese man in Japan's foreign trainee program was duped into performing radioactive decontamination work in areas devastated by the 2011 nuclear disaster, Bungo Okabe, 36, was the first to offer help in seeking justice.

Okabe, a Vietnamese by birth who grew up in Japan, took the 24-year-old man to a shelter he runs for trainees in Koriyama, Fukushima Prefecture, and helped him to receive unemployment insurance payments and find a new workplace to complete his three-year training program.

The man, whose name was being withheld for privacy reasons, is one of many trainees Okabe has defended since he opened the shelter in January after hearing stories of abuse and struggles from Vietnamese trainees living in his neighborhood.