Skid Row Homeless a Dark Spot in Japanese Success

Shoichi Imura, an aging laborer who died in April leaving only his fingerprints as a clue to his identity, belongs in a curious footnote to Japan’s economic success story.

After years of toiling as a construction worker, hiring himself out by the day to the small subcontractors who helped rebuild the country after World War II, Imura became a “cardboard man,” one of the shabby creatures who haul stacks of boxes on carts along the bustling streets of Japanese cities.

He earned about $8 a day redeeming his scavenged cardboard at recycling centers. Every evening he stopped by a soup kitchen run by the Franciscan Friars in Kamagasaki, Osaka’s skid row, and at night he slept among rags in his cart, which he would park under an elevated freeway. Then, one day last winter, he could no longer walk, and he asked for help--maybe for the first time in his life.

Father Akira Fujiwara took the old man to a hospital, where he died after a few months’ rest. When the priest went back to administer the last rites he found police officers photographing Imura’s body and taking fingerprints. The authorities had to know who he was, for their records.

They found out. Imura was identified as a Korean immigrant, age 70, with no next of kin to claim his remains. Fujiwara is awaiting permission to place Imura’s ashes in a small locker among rows of other forgotten men in an impromptu chapel at his soup kitchen, which doubles as a day-care center for the elderly.

Imura’s anonymous life and death is part of the numb routine in Kamagasaki, a seedy district of Osaka that once caused the city fathers so much shame that they took its name off the map. Just a few miles south of the luxurious department stores and office towers at the center of this thriving industrial city, Kamagasaki is a magnet for unemployed laborers, alcoholics and dropouts--people who have run out of luck, or hope.

Flophouses, Cheap Bars

The bureaucrats have tried to clean up the area. They went so far as to rename it “Airin,” which means “neighborly love,” a name that residents ignore. Kamagasaki remains a quarter square mile of flophouses, cheap bars and decaying buildings. On these streets are seen the painfully human faces of people who inhabit the underside of the Japanese miracle.

Japan is largely free of the post-industrial urban blight that scars many American and European cities. Kamagasaki is as close an approximation to a slum as can be found, but it is one largely without women or children. Life here revolves around the yoseba , the labor market, where nearly 30,000 men compete to cash in their unskilled services for a day’s wages.

Kamagasaki is home to the largest yoseba in the country and, accordingly, the largest collection of people who are down and out. On the surface, conditions are improving, but the residents are getting older and sicker, and increasingly they are sleeping in the streets.

“One would expect a labor pool in an advanced industrial society,” Fujiwara, the priest, said. “But this is a lake, and it’s gradually becoming invisible. You can see it here in Kamagasaki, but no one knows how many are out there on the bottom of the pyramid. No one is counting.”

Cut Off From Families

Their ranks are filled with members of Japan’s hereditary outcast communities, and with Koreans who were brought to Japan as laborers, as Imura the cardboard man presumably was, when Korea was a Japanese colony, from 1910 to 1945. Most are alone, cut off from the tightly knit family and social groups that offer support networks to most Japanese. And they do not show up on official rolls.

Lately there have been signs of good times now that the demand for manual labor is picking up with public works projects paid for by Japan’s new policy of stimulating the domestic economy. Construction work related to the new Kansai International Airport, being built on landfill in Osaka Bay, has brought a modicum of prosperity to Kamagasaki, officials say.

But the boom is at best ephemeral, because the day laborers are at the bottom of the economic pyramid. At the top, employees of major companies have guarantees of lifetime employment, along with health insurance and pension plans. Security gets more tenuous in each successive layer of subcontractors on the way down to the base, in a system that is structured to allow adaptability to business cycles.

Temporary employees of the subcontractors to the subcontractors have nothing to fall back on when they get laid off or become unable to work. Workers are concerned about potential competition from the cheap foreign labor that is gradually flowing--illegally--into Japan, drawn by the high yen, but mostly they worry about getting old.

Many Sleep in Parks

“At first glance it looks like the flophouses have been cleaned up and the workers are wearing nicer clothes around here,” said Kunio Miura, deputy director of the Labor Welfare Center in Kamagasaki, a municipally funded agency that administers the labor market. “But the flip side is that there are a lot more people sleeping in the parks. Even if people are willing to work, many of them are at an age where they’re not fit for it anymore.”

Yasuo Matsumoto, 74, is not an unusual case. He spent 30 years living in modest hotel rooms in Kamagasaki and working on daily contract as a driver and construction hand until February, when he was hospitalized for an eye operation. Having never registered with the authorities, he cannot qualify for welfare, even now that he is too infirm to work, because he has no fixed address. Nor can he impose on the wife and daughter he abandoned years ago.

“I’ve caused my family so much trouble I can’t very well burden them with my problems now,” Matsumoto said. “I’d be sleeping on the street if I didn’t have a friend to put me up.”

The typical vagrant in Japan has some distinct differences from his foreign brethren in, say, Los Angeles or New York. Although many subsist by picking food out of restaurant garbage and have a predilection for drink--cheap sake and a pungent potato spirit called shochu are the local brews--panhandling money from strangers is not done. Even those deranged by the ravages of life on the streets seem to retain a stubborn, proud work ethic.

Can’t Get Health Back

“This is ruining my body,” said Kengo Maeda, 42, who has been sleeping on the sidewalk along a strip of electronics shops in Osaka’s Nihonbashi district, near Kamagasaki, since his last construction job four years ago. “I’ve got to get my health back so I can work again, and get some lodging. But I can’t get my health back like this.”

Volunteers who deliver food and blankets to the homeless estimate that there are between 400 and 500 people sleeping on the streets in the vicinity of Kamagasaki and as many as 2,000 homeless in all of Osaka, which is Japan’s third-most-populous city. Thousands more live in the subways and parks of Tokyo, Yokohama and other cities. Their stories begin to sound similar after a while: They held responsible jobs until a drinking problem or a personal upheaval sent them tumbling.

Hiro Yamanaka, 73, lives on a patch of concrete in an underground passageway in Tokyo’s West Shinjuku district, where the city’s skyscrapers are clustered. He says he has been rooted there for two years, since his brother died and he lost his livelihood in the family’s tatami mat workshop. Yamanaka dreams sometimes of getting back under a roof, maybe into a government home for the aged, but he cannot fathom the bureaucratic red tape required to make such a move.

“It’s not a matter of pride,” he says. “I just don’t want to hassle with welfare. It’s a big bother.”

Few ‘Bag Ladies’

Few “bag ladies” are seen among the homeless in Japan, suggesting that the society is more protective of its women. Nor is there widespread evidence of the mentally ill living on the streets, largely owing to the continued practice of warehousing patients in institutions, social workers say. But vagrancy has its grand traditions in Japan. In Kyoto, the ancient capital, local lore has it that beggars have lived under the bridges along the Kamo River since the 10th Century. Men still live under the bridges, but they do not bother to beg anymore. Society does not tolerate it.

“There’s no use trying to panhandle, because people wouldn’t give us anything,” says Takayuku Miyazaki, a 51-year-old cardboard man who sleeps nestled in the girders under Oike Bridge.

With few exceptions, the Japanese bum is a displaced worker. Part of his problem is caused by increasingly higher lodging costs in yoseba districts like Kamagasaki, where easy credit has allowed flophouse owners to obtain bank loans to rebuild fancier accommodations. Tiny, closet-like rooms that rented for $3 to $4 a day used to be plentiful, but now these men must choose from rooms in so-called business hotels that have television and air conditioning and cost up to $16.

Such rents are affordable when work is available and the men can earn the going rate of about $77 a day, but unemployment is endemic with these men. In Kamagasaki, even during the good times, officials say that only about 12,000 of the estimated 30,000 laborers find work, resulting in an unemployment rate of about 60%. Japan’s national unemployment average has hovered at about 3% since the high yen began triggering industrial restructuring about two years ago, and that rate is considered high.

Unemployment Benefits

Another 4,000 to 5,000 Kamagasaki men receive special day laborer’s unemployment benefits of about $50 a day, but these payments are contingent on work history. A laborer must work 28 days over a two-month period to qualify for two weeks’ benefits. The alternative is to buy work stamps for his unemployment card on the black market, which is one of several yoseba rackets run by the yakuza , or gangsters.

Yakuza control of hiring is entrenched in most of Japan’s urban yoseba , except in Kamagasaki, where a radical union rallied workers to drive the mob out of the market in 1972. But they remained on the streets, outside the sprawling, filthy Labor Welfare Center, where the hiring takes place every day at dawn. Police count about 500 gangsters from 24 separate families in the district, active mostly in street gambling, loan sharking and prostitution.

A stroll around Kamagasaki offers a feast of city color that is increasingly rare in Japan’s antiseptic urban environment. The neighborhood is vibrant with foot traffic, moving to chaotic rhythms as the occasional car or truck horns its way through. The sidewalks are littered with sleeping bodies, and in Triangle Park, men in dirty jodhpurs circle around bottles of shochu , pitch coins in the sand or crowd intently around yakuza card games.

Watched by Video Cameras

It seems an oasis of freedom in an otherwise tightly structured society--until one notices the police video cameras mounted on telephone poles throughout the neighborhood.

Police say the cameras are there to protect residents, not to keep them under surveillance, but they acknowledge that no other community in Japan has them. They were installed after an argument over a rotten watermelon erupted in rioting in the district in 1961, starting a wave of violence that brought national attention to the misery of Kamagasaki workers.

The rage has long subsided, partly because the government started dispensing unemployment benefits and partly because workers no longer live exclusively in the hot little cubicles of the old flophouses. But trouble continues in Tokyo’s yoseba district, called Sanya, where militant laborers are still struggling with yakuza and the police.

In Kamagasaki, the consensus is that overall labor conditions have much improved. Many residents now say they like life here because it is easy-going and without the rigid social controls of the more orthodox life styles that they cast aside.

‘It’s Carefree’

“This is much better,” said Toshio Masuyama, a 41-year-old former truck driver who left his wife to come to Kamagasaki 15 months ago. “It’s carefree. I feel like I’ve been liberated. I’m a little worried, though. I’m not so sure about my future.”

Kamagasaki is at once an escape hatch and a trap. The inexorable draw of the district has its fix on Minoru Inaoka, 51, a former high-rise construction worker who lost his job after becoming an alcoholic two years ago. Inaoka, who spends his days at a counseling center, blames his downfall on his fanaticism for the Hanshin Tigers baseball team, which he says drove him to drink.

“I didn’t want to end up here,” Inaoka said, “but there’s no other way to make a living. There’s no one who’ll hire me now. I’d like to go back to mainstream society and start over again, but I can’t. Maybe in 10 years I’ll be sleeping in the streets. Probably that’s what will happen.”