Japan says Chinese are now country's No. 1 minority

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Chinese-speaking residents _ from the Chinese mainland, Hong Kong and Taiwan _ accounted for 28.2 percent of Japan's 2.15 million registered foreigners at the end of December, while Koreas dropped to 27.6 percent.

As more Chinese have come to Japan, many Koreans _ often longtime residents of Japan _ have increasingly taken Japanese citizenship, said Koji Nakagawa, a spokesman at Japan's Immigration Bureau.

Koreans, many of them descendants of laborers brought to Japan during Tokyo's 1910-1945 colonization of the Korean peninsula, have long been the country's largest foreign group.

Japan does not grant citizenship automatically to people born on its territory, and many Koreans born in Japan have traditionally kept their North or South Korean passports.

But that tendency is eroding as the younger generation, many of whom do not speak Korean, have adopted Japanese citizenship. The older population of Koreans, meanwhile, has dwindled as they enter their 80s and 90s.

There were 606,889 Chinese residents and 593,489 Korean residents in Japan last year.

Brazilians and Filipinos are Japan's third- and fourth-largest foreign groups. Americans accounted for just 2.4 percent of foreign residents.

Foreign residents have been steadily increasing and now make up about 1.7 percent of Japan's population of 127.8 million.