TOYOTA CITY, Japan  Facing labor shortages back in 1990 but ever wary of allowing in foreigners, Japan made an exception for Japanese-Brazilians. With their Japanese roots, names and faces, these children and grandchildren of Japanese emigrants to Brazil would fit more easily in a society fiercely closed to outsiders, or so the reasoning went.

In the two decades since then, despite periodic economic downturns like the current one, the number of Japanese-Brazilian workers in Japan has kept growing. They are clustered in industrial regions dotted with factories supplying familiar companies like Honda, Sanyo and Toyota, whose headquarters gave this city in central Japan its name.

But perhaps nowhere in this country do Japanese and Japanese-Brazilians rub shoulders with such intensity as in a public housing complex here called Homi Estate. Built in the 1970s for young Japanese families, Homi has a population of 8,891 that is now nearly evenly split between Japanese, at 52 percent, and foreigners, at 48 percent.

“To be honest,” Toshinori Fujiwara, 69, a Japanese community leader, said, “I never imagined in my wildest dreams that this would ever become a multiethnic neighborhood.”