What Happens When Japan Stops Looking ‘Japanese’?

The Kurdish 21-year-old arrived in Japan when he was 8. He learned Japanese, played baseball with classmates, and eventually fell in love with a Vietnamese girl at school. The pair sat together when I visited his parents’ apartment outside Tokyo, speaking Japanese in hushed tones, their pinky toes just barely touching. Dinner was Kurdish-style yogurt and lamb, with chopsticks next to each plate. The couple had been together six years, and her father had recently given them permission to marry.

But this young man—who jokingly asked to be referred to as Johnny Depp, fearful of a legal backlash if he used his real name—cannot marry his girlfriend anytime soon. He and his family fled Turkey to avoid retribution over their support for Kurdish independence and because Johnny faced mandatory military service. They eventually made it to Japan to ask for refugee status, but the country’s notoriously restrictive immigration officials have already rejected his application four times.

Johnny may look like a foreigner, but he feels like a local—so he is persisting, taking the authorities to court to try to win the legal right to stay here and, in the process, set a precedent for his two younger siblings