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Japanese foundation has operated in about ten countries, but Vietnam remains the most visited destination by the team since the start of the volunteer mission in 1993
In a quiet corner of the Mekong Delta in Vietnam, a team of Japanese doctors, dentists, and nurses has been carrying out a volunteer mission for 34 years to offer free surgeries to people born with cleft lip or palate. According to a report by The Japan Times, with information from Chunichi Shimbun, this year the Japan Cleft Palate Foundation — a non-profit organization based in Nagoya — sent a team of 58 healthcare professionals from different regions of Japan to the rural province of Vinh Long, about 90 kilometers south of Ho Chi Minh, between March 21 and 29.
34 years of mission: how the Japanese task force operates in Vietnam
After facing city traffic and crossing the Mekong River on a three-hour journey, the team members arrived at Nguyen Dinh Chieu General Hospital, a 1,400-bed facility that serves as the base for the annual mission of the Japanese.
For Natsume, 69, executive director of the foundation and professor at the Aichi Gakuin University School of Dentistry in Nagoya, Vietnam is already like a second home — a feeling that, according to him, is renewed with each new trip to the country. The foundation has carried out international missions in about ten countries, including Myanmar, Mongolia, and Laos, but Vietnam remains the most visited destination by the team.
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The volunteer mission in the country began in 1993, responding to a request from local residents who had heard about the foundation’s international activities. At the time, Vietnam had few specialists in cleft lip and palate treatment and relied heavily on foreign technical support.
In Japan, people born with cleft lip or palate usually lead a normal life, provided they receive appropriate treatment from childhood to adolescence. In many developing countries, however, treatment is often delayed due to financial difficulties and limited access to specialized care — which means some patients reach adulthood without surgery, potentially resulting in discrimination in the job market and marriage.
Over decades of work, Japanese maxillofacial surgeons — highly qualified professionals — have successfully performed over 3,000 surgeries in Vietnam. Many Vietnamese patients and their families eagerly await the team’s annual visit.
On the afternoon of March 22, with temperatures above 30°C, the Japanese team transformed a hospital corridor into an improvised screening clinic. Tables, chairs, and electric fans were distributed throughout the corridor while about 50 families gathered in the hope that their children could finally be operated on.
Parents and patients expressed their hopes one after another — some asked for no visible scar to remain, others just wanted to improve their appearance. Natsume carefully examined each patient, assessing oral conditions and overall health before deciding if surgery could be performed.
The next morning, work began at 7 a.m. in three surgical rooms equipped with instruments brought from Japan. Oral and maxillofacial surgeons and nurses operated on the patients while younger Japanese doctors and students observed to learn the specialized techniques.
In one of the rooms, a surgeon marked the incision lines around the upper lip of a 5-year-old boy under general anesthesia. With meticulous precision, the team repaired muscles and tissues that had remained separated since birth. Three hours later, the boy woke up and was taken to a recovery room where his mother waited anxiously. Pediatrician Reizo Baba, a 69-year-old professor from Chubu University, greeted the boy with a reassuring smile, ensuring everything was fine. By the end of the first day, eight surgeries had been completed.
The drama of Vietnamese families and the case of the little story of Le Thi Be Trang
Cleft lip and palate are congenital conditions that occur when parts of the fetus’s face do not fully fuse during gestation, leaving an opening in the lip, palate, or both. The condition can affect feeding, speech development, and hearing, and is believed to occur in approximately 1 in every 500 to 700 births — being more common in Asia than in Europe or North America.
Among the patients treated by the Japanese team this year was a boy just 3 months old. His mother, Le Thi Be Trang, 31, was visibly relieved after her son’s surgery ended successfully.
“Everything went well. I am very grateful,” she said, resting her face on her sleeping son shortly after the operation.
During the prenatal examination, doctors had discovered that the baby would have a cleft lip and palate. Relatives on the father’s side even pressured the family to terminate the pregnancy.
Le and her husband make a living from fruit farming, and the family’s finances are tight. Even so, she decided to continue with the pregnancy, fearing she would not be able to afford the treatment — and stated she felt deeply grateful that Japanese doctors performed the surgery for free.
In Vietnam, advances in prenatal diagnosis have reduced the number of babies born with visible congenital conditions. Many parents opt for abortion upon learning that the child will have a cleft lip and palate, often due to insufficient medical support systems and the mistaken belief that the condition cannot be corrected. Even when couples decide to continue with the pregnancy, access to treatment remains a challenge in the country’s rural areas.
Microcredit and the challenge of keeping treatment accessible in rural Vietnam
While the major Vietnamese cities experience rapid economic growth, many rural areas still face a shortage of doctors and specialized care. Nguyen Dinh Chieu General Hospital is the only facility in the region capable of treating cleft lip and palate — and it has only one maxillofacial surgeon, Tran Le Duy, aged 41.
Tran studied for four years, starting in 2015, at the Aichi Gakuin University School of Dentistry, during which he gained surgical experience. Even so, since returning to Vietnam over five years ago, he has performed only about 20 cleft lip and palate surgeries on his own. The number of patients seeking treatment at the hospital has dropped to approximately half the levels recorded before the Covid-19 pandemic.
According to Tran, families with financial resources tend to opt for large hospitals in urban areas, while patients from rural regions face more difficulty receiving long-term specialized treatment. In Vinh Long province, the monthly minimum wage is less than half the cost of a hospital stay — and expenses for medication, food, and transportation make treatment even more inaccessible for low-income families.
As a member of the Japan Cleft Palate Foundation itself, Tran often advises patients to wait for the annual Japanese medical mission as one of the most viable alternatives.
To help families who hesitate to seek treatment due to financial constraints, the foundation has maintained a microcredit program since 1997 with interest rates of about 0.7% per month. According to a local women’s association that manages the program, more than 1,200 people have already benefited. Over 29 years, the fund has grown to more than 800 million Vietnamese dongs (about ¥4.8 million), expanding its capacity to support low-income families.
This spring, with the aim of reducing the number of abortions related to cleft lip and palate, the foundation also introduced a new incentive: families whose children were treated by the Japanese medical mission are entitled to a higher loan limit.
Observing the smiling faces of parents and children after successful surgeries, Natsume summarized the purpose behind decades of volunteer work: the desire for more children to grow up feeling happy to have been born.
