The small town that's teaching Japan about immigration

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. Õizumi, rather than the country's capital, is at the forefront of Japan's foreigner-friendly future.

- Justin McCurry

The northern Kantō plain is an unlikely setting for an experiment in multiculturalism, but this is provincial Japan with a twist. Signs at the local railway station are written in six languages. At the ticket office, a member of staff deals patiently with a customer struggling to speak 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 karaoke bars.

The sense that this is no ordinary Japanese town is supported by demographic data- of Õizumi'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.

"Õizumi 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. I used to live in a bigger town nearby and people would ignore me when I greeted them. It's not like that here."