If Japan throws its doors open to immigrants it might start looking like a certain neighborhood in Yokohama with multilingual street signs, ethnic eateries, and a babel of languages spoken in the streets.
At the heart of this unconventional neighborhood is the so-called Icho housing complex less than 1 km east of Koza Shibuya Station on the Odakyu Enoshima Line. Roughly 20 percent of the 3,500 or so households here have foreign backgrounds, many having arrived in the past few decades from Vietnam, China and Cambodia.
"One good thing about this area is that people are ethnically very diverse. Here, it's normal for you to be different from others," said Hoang Ha Nguyen Phan, a 28-year-old Vietnamese who came to Japan with her family in 1995 to seek political asylum.