Japan’s approach to immigrants is a manifestation of its unique sense of national identity, derived from centuries of aggressively limiting outside influences. Being Japanese goes beyond the language, which is difficult to speak and far more difficult to write. It’s about talking softly in public and private; abiding by confusing rules about garbage disposal; eating fish with chopsticks out of bento boxes. Many Japanese describe their way of life as so unique that foreigners are ill-equipped to adopt it.

But the approximately 2.3 million migrants living in Japan—a 37 percent increase from 2000 to 2017—are now testing whether Japan can continue to be Japan if everyone doesn’t necessarily look “Japanese.” Johnny, for example, sees himself and his family as Japanese, even if he doesn’t have the paperwork to prove it. “We no longer yell and talk loudly inside shops and restaurants, things like that,” he told me. “We learned to adopt the general code of conduct in Japan.”

In 1981, Japan signed the United Nations’ refugee convention, which called for the protection of people facing persecution. In practice, however, it does not live up to this responsibility, even as ever greater numbers of desperate foreigners fly into Tokyo’s airports seeking refugee status. More than 10,000 people applied for refugee status last year; just 42 were approved. Contrast that with the United States, where, even under the hard-line anti-immigration stance of President Donald Trump, in the 2019 fiscal year nearly a third of 67,067 applicants won asylum and a path to citizenship. In Canada, most applicants win their cases.

Read: The philosophical differences on immigration between Canada and the U.S.

Japan also participates in the UN’s refugee-resettlement program, in which some of the millions of people in refugee camps around the world are allowed to move to a new country. Thousands of people were resettled this way in Britain, Canada, France, Germany, and the U.S. last year. Japan took in just 22.

The system is unforgiving. Many asylum seekers are held in detention centers while their cases are being processed, particularly if they are believed to have used fraudulent documents to escape to Japan. (Johnny’s father did two stints in detention.) Applicants can legally work while they wait for their paperwork to be reviewed, but not for the first eight months after their arrival. And if they are rejected and appeal, like Johnny has, they are either detained or put on “provisional release,” which comes with restrictions on employment, health-insurance coverage, and travel within the country.

In recent years, this tough approach to immigration has been confronted with an emerging reality: Japan’s population is aging and its birth rate is among the lowest in the world. The labor force is depleted, and businesses are desperate for new workers to jump-start a stalled economy. So officials are starting to recognize that they can’t afford to live without immigrants. Prime Minister Shinzo Abe announced last year that about 350,000 unskilled laborers will be granted guest visas over the next five years to backfill small and medium-size enterprises in industries such as agriculture, nursing, and construction. The migrants cannot bring relatives with them, and are dissuaded from settling down, but this nevertheless marks a significant shift.