Chinese become Japan's largest foreign community

Chinese people for the first time have come to constitute Japan's largest foreign community, partially thanks to the local government's admission in recent years of more Chinese with advanced degrees, Japanese officials said on Tuesday.

At the end of 2007, Chinese residents in Japan with legal status totaled 606,899, accounting for 28.2 percent of the foreign population, according to the Japanese Justice Ministry.

The Chinese have replaced the Koreans, who account for 27.6 percent of the foreign population, as the largest source of foreign citizens for the first time since the ministry started collecting data in 1959.