An unassuming industrial town in Japan, far from the busy tourist hubs of Tokyo and Kyoto, is in the middle of an unprecedented social transformation. Ōizumi, rather than the country’s capital, is at the forefront of Japan’s foreigner-friendly future.
The northern Kantō plain is an unlikely setting for the country’s experiment in multiculturalism, but this is provincial Japan with a twist. Signs at the local railway station – Nishi-Koizumi – are written in six languages. At the ticket office, a member of staff deals patiently with a customer struggling to communicate in Japanese.
The main street is an eclectic mix of supermarkets selling food and drink from Brazil, Peru and Colombia, kebab shops, Nepalese and Indian restaurants, halal butchers and south-east Asian karaoke bars.
The sense that this is no ordinary Japanese town is supported by demographic data – of Ōizumi’s 42,000 residents, more than 8,000 are foreign nationals from 49 countries, making it one of the biggest immigrant communities in the country.
“Ōizumi is changing,” said Yumi Kuroki, a second-generation Japanese-Brazilian who runs a supermarket. “It used to be a Brazilian town but now there are a lot more people from Asia. It’s a friendly community, and I think Japanese people here are used to having foreign neighbours. I used to live in a bigger town nearby and people would ignore me when I greeted them. It’s not like that here.”
Brazilians and Peruvians account for about 70% of Ōizumi’s foreign residents – second- and third-generation people of Japanese descent who moved here in the early 1990s after Japan invited them to work in electronics and car factories.
But the town’s foreign population has expanded and diversified in the decades since. Japan has traditionally been described as a proudly homogenous society, and long resisted foreign labour, with exceptions made for those in professions such as teaching, medicine, engineering and the law. Other, less skilled, workers were part of a government-run foreign technical trainee programme that provided people from developing countries with know-how they could take back to their home countries after a maximum of five years in Japan.
But the programme did not address chronic labour shortages, prompting a change in immigration rules in 2019 – supported by a majority of the public in opinion polls – that has spurred an influx of blue-collar workers. In Ōizumi, Latin Americans were joined by people from Nepal, India and Vietnam. Today, its public schools teach children from 23 countries. Once known as “Brazil town”, it now officially promotes itself as “international town”.
Ōizumi is at the forefront of a demographic movement that is reshaping communities across Japan. As the country’s population continues to fall, its foreign community keeps growing. Immigration data released this month showed the population of non-Japanese had reached a record 3.2 million – a trend that belies Japan’s “closed door” reputation. Key industries – manufacturing, restaurants, construction, agriculture and fisheries – would struggle to survive without migrant labour.
In Ōizumi, foreign nationals are employed at plants run by Panasonic, Fuji Heavy Industries and Subaru, while others have launched their own ventures in the service sector. The result is a kaleidoscope of languages, cuisines and cultures that is being repeated in other parts of the country, from the neighbouring town of Isesaki to suburban Tokyo neighbourhoods and the central prefecture of Aichi, the home of Toyota.
Ōizumi employs teams of interpreters, and runs a multicultural centre where residents can seek advice on everything from healthcare to paying bills. There are multilingual guides to rubbish disposal, and extracurricular language lessons for children attending primary and middle school.
Local officials concede that not everyone was prepared for the influx of foreign residents. “There were older people who complained of too many foreigners,” said Masami Fukuda of Ōizumi town hall’s multicultural cooperation division.
“But that’s mainly a generational thing. In the past, a lot of people hadn’t even met a foreigner, but now their grandchildren go to school with children from all over the world.”
There have been setbacks – sorting household rubbish, which is done in a very particular way in Japan, has been a source of friction – but officials say community relations are on a sound footing. “The rules are there for Japanese residents, too, not just for foreigners,” said Ryota Shinohara, who also works for Ōizumi’s multicultural cooperation division.
In 2024, the town could take its engagement a step further by becoming only the third municipality in the country to hire foreigners as civil servants. “There are various hurdles but we must take a step forwards,” said the mayor, Toshiaki Murayama, last month.
Japanese law forbids non-Japanese from roles that involve decision-making or the exercise of power – collecting taxes, for example – but the bar does not apply to other jobs in the public sector.
“The town’s approach is different from the days when migrant workers would come for a while and then go back to their home countries,” said Fukuda. “Now they are settling down, starting families and buying homes. That means we don’t regard, say, hiring interpreters as an additional cost – it’s part of our civic duty to serve the entire community.”
* * *
Long-term Ōizumi residents include Kumar Yamada, a supermarket owner from Nepal who acquired Japanese nationality four years ago. “I always dreamed of owning my own business,” said Yamada, who worked as a mechanical engineer before moving to Ōizumi, where he lives with his Nepalese wife and their two children.
“But I never thought I would realise my dream in Japan. I came here as an exchange student and fell in love with it.”
Opposite his shop is a Turkish kebab restaurant, a Brazilian beauty salon and a Philippine bar. “It feels like a genuine foreign community,” added Yamada, who occasionally puts his fluency in Japanese, Nepali and Hindi to use as a police interpreter. “People tend to stick with people from their own countries, but we all get along.”
While Japan’s population is forecast to plummet from its current 125 million to an estimated 88 million by 2065, the foreign contingent is expected to rise, with public thinktanks warning last year that it will need to quadruple the number of migrant workers by 2040 for the government to achieve its economic growth targets.
Fukuda said they would receive a warm welcome in Ōizumi: “This is just a small town. We’re a long way from the sea, and there are no mountains. Our selling point is our diversity.”
