KOBE -- The Kobe city government is working to provide more information on daily life for Vietnamese residents of the city.
The number of Vietnamese residents in Kobe has rapidly increased to about 4.4 times its level five years ago, and trouble has sometimes developed with Japanese neighbors, mainly due to differences in lifestyle.
The city government therefore created a Facebook page exclusively to provide information in Vietnamese, and produced a video clip explaining the rules on sorting and taking out garbage. By providing information essential for daily life, the city government wants to create a situation in which residents can live with a sense of security whatever their nationality.
The number of Vietnamese residents in the city as of the end of March 2013 was 1,584, and had risen to 6,993 as of the end of October 2018. About 80 percent are relatively young, under 30 years old, mainly because of an increase in the number of students who have come to Japan.
Since the end of the Vietnam War in 1975, Kobe has accepted many Vietnamese refugees. Communities of Vietnamese residents have been formed in some areas of the city, such as Nagata Ward. The city government believes Vietnamese newcomers who enrolled in schools in Japan have gathered in the Vietnamese communities, as they provide support.
There has been increasing trouble in the city over things including trash separation, which is not common in Vietnam, according to the city government.
The Kobe government has also provided information necessary for daily life in several languages on the website of the Kobe International Community Center. This time, it decided to enhance the dissemination of such information by utilizing Facebook, which is used as an information media tool by young Vietnamese people.
Dang Trung Hung, a 29-year-old Vietnamese official of the city government's international affairs section, is in charge of dispatching the information. Via the Facebook page, he sends out information about three times a week on various events, assistance programs for foreigners in the city, and how to evacuate if a disaster occurs.
He also receives questions and comments from people through Facebook's chat function. If there are many questions and opinions about the same issue, he posts answers in the page's readers' column as needed, so that residents who see the information will spread it around.
The about two-minute video clip on how to sort and take out garbage features "Waketon," a character created by the city government to promote proper separation of garbage. The video clip explains the rules in spoken Vietnamese and subtitles, emphasizing these three points:
-- Garbage must be taken out between 5 a.m. and 8 a.m. on the dates of collection.
-- Trash must be separated and put in designated garbage bags.
-- Garbage bags must be placed in designated places.
The video clip can be seen on the website of the city government and the Facebook page.
In fiscal 2019, the city government plans to add another Vietnamese official in charge of dispatching information, and make the information available in Chinese, Portuguese and other languages.
A city government official said, "We want to work toward the multilingual dispatch of information so that foreign nationals from countries other than English-speaking ones can live comfortably."
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