The number of foreign residents in Japan had risen 6.6 percent at the end of 2018 from a year earlier, to reach a record high of some 2.73 million, Justice Ministry data showed on Friday.
The increase in foreign students and technical trainee visa holders, especially from Vietnam, contributed to the overall growth, an official with the ministry's Immigration Bureau said.
As of the end of last year, 337,000 non-Japanese were registered as students and another 328,360 were technical interns who had come to Japan under government-sponsored programs — each figure up nearly 20 percent from a year earlier, the official said.