Japanese Language Education in Vietnam - in The Empire of Vietnam

In The Empire of 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 Japanese Residents' Association (日本人会?). 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 Saigon Japanese School (サイゴン日本語学校?), the Affiliated Japanese School of Nanyō Gakuen (南洋学院附属日本語学校?) and the Kyōei Japanese Academy (共栄日語学院?) 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.