Japanese language education in Vietnam

Japan's invasion of Indochina began in September 1940; by July of the following year, they had reached the southern end of Vietnam. However, courses in Japanese were not established until March 1942, largely under the direction of semi-private associations such as the . By April 1943, education in Japanese as a second language was being conducted in Hanoi, Haiphong, and Saigon targeted not only at Vietnamese people, but local ethnic Chinese and French people as well. In Hanoi, the authorities set up two night courses, one in a primary school and one in a Chinese middle school; the courses offered only three contact hours per week of instruction. 1,000 students attended the classes. The courses in Haiphong was more intense, with ten contact hours per week; a total of 270 students enrolled. Saigon featured the largest concentration of courses; seven schools, including the , the and the offered courses from three to twelve hours per week, enrolling a total of 900 students. The total number of students was reported by local newspapers to have grown to 2,500 by May 1944. The teaching materials, locally published after the invasion, were written largely in romanisation or katakana and aimed at comprehension of simple spoken language. Motivations for study included the need to communicate and do business with the occupying troops, the desire to find jobs in Japanese-managed companies which began setting up offices in Vietnam, and for civil servants, the administrative needs of the new government. After the Japanese withdrawal, the need for the language disappeared, along with the teaching staff for the schools. However, some people educated in Japanese during this era would go on to play a role in the revival of Japanese language teaching in the 1960s and 1970s, such as Nguyen Ngoc Canh, who helped the University of Foreign Trade set up the first postwar Japanese course in 1962. ==Education and industry==

Hanoi Foreign Languages University and the University of Foreign Trade establish regular elective courses in Japanese in 1973. Schools such as Hanoi's Chu Van An High School and Ho Chi Minh City's Le Quy Don School began offering the language to senior high school students in 2003. Chu Van An School also extended its Japanese language teaching to its junior high school students later that year, making it the first school to offer a Japanese course to students at that level; aimed at seventh graders, the course met twice per week and used textbooks donated by the Japanese government. The Vietnam Software Association (VINASA) foresee a major shortfall in the number of proficient Japanese speakers relative to the needs of their industry; they projected that 18,000 programmers would be needed if they hoped to meet their target of capturing 10% of the Japanese outsourcing market, but as of 2004, the country only had 500 information technology who could speak Japanese. The average salary of a new university graduate working in the IT industry in Vietnam was VND2 million/month as of 2006; a graduate with proficiency in Japanese could earn VND3.2 million/month in Vietnam, but with wages of Vietnamese programmers working in Japan through manpower agencies from four to twelve times that amount, most Japanese-speaking IT staff prefer to work in Japan. Various tie-ups between industry and universities have resulted as companies seek to resolve their labour issues; VINASA are working with Hanoi's FPT University to set up a Japanese language programme for students of the university's embedded software faculty, while Japanese software development corporation Sorun plans to open a Japanese language school in a joint venture with the Ho Chi Minh City University of Technology, with the aim of reducing their own shortage of engineers; they plan to sponsor the top 10 graduates to come to Japan to work at their Tokyo headquarters. Similarly, NEC set up a job centre to match Japanese-speaking people in Vietnam with Japanese companies seeking employees, aiming to find 300 employees by 2010; however, in 6 months, they only managed to match 8 people. ==Standardised testing==

The Japanese Language Proficiency Test was first offered in Hanoi; an additional test site was added in Ho Chi Minh City in 2000, which in its first year received almost triple the number of examinees as the Hanoi site. ==See also==