Shantytowns? In MY Japan?

[Mudkip Orange]

It's more likely than you think.

 

 

 

Was pretty surprised to find this while surfing the Keikyu line with Google in one window and a SIN1000IGBT cab view on the other.

 

*Are* these homeless encampments? Or is there some other explanation for these ramshackle blue-tarp structures in the floodplain?

[bikkuri bahn]

Yes, those are homeless encampments along the Tama River behind that cheap golf driving range.  The homeless tend to congregate along the riverfront, especiallly as they can live inconspicuously in the tall grass that grows near the river's edge, as well as have easy access to water for washing etc.

[Bernard]

Mudkip - you never think about a homeless problem when you think of Japan. Your post is the first time I ever heard of this problem.

When I was in Vancouver during the Olympics it was a big problem and there were protests during the games. In Beijing from what I understand the government moved the homeless out of the city during their Olympics. The protests where how can the governments spend all this money on new stadiums when people were homeless.

[westfalen]

I remember seeing homeless people living like that in parks around Shinjuku in 1998.

[KenS]

I'd run across references to, and photos of, homeless people along the Sumida river in central Tokyo when I was researching the scenery of that region last year.  Here is a photo showing tents along the embankment:

 

 

And here are a couple of others taken somewhere else in Tokyo, the first with some comments about the residents:

 

http://www.flickr.com/photos/jeremycusker/3589043846/

http://www.flickr.com/photos/de3ug/1797545123/

 

Japan is not immune to the economic and social problems that cause homelessness.

[stevenh]

Zoom in pretty much anywhere along the Yodo River (saying 'Yodogawa River' sounds weird  ) and you'll see them.

 

I acually rode my bike along one stretch under the JR bridge(s) and a pack of barking, seemingly hungry dogs chased me. Around 7 and at least one got a taste of my shoe. Not the happiest moment.

[to2leo]

Homelessness is a hidden issue in Japan.  If you wake up early enough (to catch the first train), you will see the homeless people sleeping inside pedestrian tunnels located through out Japanese cities.  However, when compared to the homeless population of most nations, they are clean well manner and educated.

 

Many also choose the Internet Bars to have a climate control space to rest for the night.

[Mudkip Orange]

I'd run across references to, and photos of, homeless people along the Sumida river in central Tokyo when I was researching the scenery of that region last year.

 

http://www.flickr.com/photos/de3ug/1797545123/

 

That guy's response was the same as mine, "they have homeless people in Japan?"

[scott]

It'd be nice to know where you could get some realistic summary of social conditions in Japan (or wherever) without getting either the whitewash or the "end is nigh" treatment.

[Guest ___]

I've found on every trip to Japan, shantytowns along the river banks.

[CaptOblivious]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DRo6Hedpeew

 

Homelessness is a real issue in Japan, and especially Tokyo; all the more so because it is regularly swept under the rug. Pay particular attention to what the narrator claims are the major causes of homelessness in Tokyo.

[Guest ___]

I just watched an english dubbed documentary last night on NHK Worldwide on the issue and the the social services failing to do much of anything on the issue do to the municipal government bureaucracy. One thing I can say I learned from that TV show was that the Japanese can take bureaucracy to a level that we here in Washington could never compete with. As with all things Japanese, the society there takes a blind eye to the homeless to the same extreme they take their bureaucracy to.

[Mudkip Orange]

You know, if the Tokyo government set aside a hunk of land for the homeless, and said "this is it, you can camp out here, you can build shanties, and we're not going to enforce vagrancy laws or building codes," it would probably end up turning into one of the most interesting areas of the city. Especially if there were no restrictions on commerce. Give it 30 or 40 years, you'd have Blade Runner.

[stevenh]

Mudkip, I totally agree and ... love BladeRunner :)...

But that kind of 'action' would mean the Government 'acknowledging' homelessness as a 'problem' in Japan.

[ToniBabelony]

You'd get something like this: http://zeekeekee.wordpress.com/2009/05/05/kowloon-walled-city-something-out-of-a-science-fiction-story/

 

Include the Blade Runner atmosphere with the low-flying aicraft to the old Hong-Kong Airport and you have a Ghost in the Shell sci-fi slum.

[Guest ___]

The shanty town idea is something I am thinking of doing to phase two of my layout, down near the river, but have yet to do so. I had seen a few layouts in Osaka earlier this year where the "encampments" had been added to the layout and it worked pretty well. It also seemed to reflect what is an all too common site along Japanese waterways.

 

BTW: I am relocating this to scenery as this topic has really nothing at all to do with railway prototypes.

[CaptOblivious]

You know, if the Tokyo government set aside a hunk of land for the homeless, and said "this is it, you can camp out here, you can build shanties, and we're not going to enforce vagrancy laws or building codes," it would probably end up turning into one of the most interesting areas of the city. Especially if there were no restrictions on commerce. Give it 30 or 40 years, you'd have Blade Runner.

 

That would be Ueno Park, by and large. There is a very large encampment here, which I went to see while I was there. It is like a refugee camp, and it's set in an area that is not readily visible unless you go looking for it. Very…swept under the rug.

[cteno4]

i have gotten glimpses of little encampments like this along waterways in japan. also see the box people in the stations. they have a heavy cardboard box that they have assembled thats just big enough to sort of box themselves into. they only are there in some passageways for a while then were gone, i expect swept out by the police. was an odd take between larger, more permanent box houses in other parts of the world.

 

i also remember an old japanese b/w movie about a sort of japanese hobo that befriends a sort of friendless kid (i think the hobo saves him from some bullying). the hobo flys under the radar of the locals by traveling the canals and rivers and rarely surfaces out into the regular town due to extreme prejudice from the residents. kid tries to get him out some, but of course the locals react and hobo ends up being driven off, kid is heartbroken to loose his new friend. bit sappy and predictable, but interesting japanese shooting in b/w that was done well.

 

cheers

 

jeff

[bikkuri bahn]

I see this thread has been moved to the "Scenery" section.  So, when will Tomix or Kato release N scale homeless figures and blue sheet shanties??

 

But seriously, I think one reason that the homeless issue (a term introduced from the west only recently) is considered "swept under the rug" by western commentators is that it just isn't considered a major issue here in Japan- an issue, yes, but not one on the minds of most Japanese. Alot has to do with exposure- aggressive panhandling and cast off veterans just don't exist here, and the homeless like to keep a low profile.  Homeless have always been in Japan (previously called "kojiki"- beggars)- I remember seeing them at a park near my Grandparents' home in Yokohama in the early eighties.  Almost all of them are males middle age or older, though the ranks have swelled with the ongoing economic downturn.  You likely won't see homeless families or children panhandling like you would in some Western countries, nor patients being dumped into Skid Row because they can't pay their medical bills.

 

Many major cities, in addition to riverside encampments, have districts that have existed for decades where the homeless/day laborers congregate- Sanya in Tokyo, Kotobuki-cho in Yokohama, or Kamagaseki in Osaka(Airin).  Basically, Japan is like any other country, with a complex society with its host of marginal groups.  It only surprises those who have preconceived notions of "Japan".

[scott]

BBC online photo essay on a homeless group in Osaka:

 

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/shared/spl/hi/asia_pac/04/japans_homeless/html/1.stm

 

Link found on a page of links to articles on various social issues in Japan:

 

http://newton.uor.edu/Departments&Programs/AsianStudiesDept/japan-issues.html

 

...which includes a link to a project I think we all hope to avoid ending up in: the "Failure Database." :-P

[mbloes]

And here's more from the New York Times last week:

 

April 21, 2010

Japan Tries to Face Up to Growing Poverty Problem

By MARTIN FACKLER

MEMURO, Japan — Satomi Sato, a 51-year-old widow, knew she had it tough, raising a teenage daughter on the less than $17,000 a year she earned from two jobs. Still, she was surprised last autumn when the government announced for the first time an official poverty line — and she was below it.

 

“I don’t want to use the word poverty, but I’m definitely poor,” said Ms. Sato, who works mornings making boxed lunches and afternoons delivering newspapers. “Poverty is still a very unfamiliar word in Japan.”

 

After years of economic stagnation and widening income disparities, this once proudly egalitarian nation is belatedly waking up to the fact that it has a large and growing number of poor people. The Labor Ministry’s disclosure in October that almost one in six Japanese, or 20 million people, lived in poverty in 2007 stunned the nation and ignited a debate over possible remedies that has raged ever since.

 

Many Japanese, who cling to the popular myth that their nation is uniformly middle class, were further shocked to see that Japan’s poverty rate, at 15.7 percent, was close to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development’s figure of 17.1 percent in the United States, whose glaring social inequalities have long been viewed with scorn and pity here.

 

But perhaps just as surprising was the government’s admission that it had been keeping poverty statistics secretly since 1998 while denying there was a problem, despite occasional anecdotal evidence to the contrary. That ended when a left-leaning government led by Prime Minister Yukio Hatoyama replaced the long-governing Liberal Democratic Party last summer with a pledge to force Japan’s legendarily secretive bureaucrats to be more open, particularly about social problems, government officials and poverty experts said.

 

“The government knew about the poverty problem, but was hiding it,” said Makoto Yuasa, head of the nonprofit Antipoverty Network. “It was afraid to face reality.”

 

Following an internationally recognized formula, the ministry set the poverty line at about $22,000 a year for a family of four, half of Japan’s median household income. Researchers estimate that Japan’s poverty rate has doubled since the nation’s real estate and stock markets collapsed in the early 1990s, ushering in two decades of income stagnation and even decline.

 

The ministry’s announcement helped expose a problem that social workers say is easily overlooked in relatively homogenous Japan, which does not have the high crime rates, urban decay and stark racial divisions of the United States. Experts and social workers say Japan’s poor can be deceptively hard to spot because they try hard to keep up the appearance of middle class comfort.

 

Few impoverished Japanese seem willing to admit their plight for fear of being stigmatized. While just over half of Japan’s single mothers, like Ms. Sato, are poor — roughly in line with the ratio in the United States — she and her daughter, Mayu, 17, take pains to hide their neediness. They outwardly smile, she said, but “cry on the inside” when friends or relatives talk about vacations, a luxury they cannot afford.

 

“Saying we’re poor would draw attention, so I’d rather hide it,” said Ms. Sato, who lives in a blocklike public housing project in this small city surrounded by flat, treeless farmland reminiscent of the American Midwest.

 

She said she had little money even before her husband, a construction machine operator, died of lung cancer three years ago. She said her family’s difficulties began in the late 1990s, when the economic slide worsened here on the northern island of Hokkaido, as it did in much of rural Japan.

 

Even with two jobs, she says she cannot afford to see a doctor or buy medicine to treat a growing host of health complaints, including sore joints and dizziness. When her daughter needed $700 to buy school uniforms on entering high school last year, a common requirement here, she saved for it by cutting back to two meals a day.

 

Poverty experts call Ms. Sato’s case typical. They say more than 80 percent of those living in poverty in Japan are part of the so-called working poor, holding low-wage, temporary jobs with no security and few benefits. They usually have enough money to eat, but not to take part in normal activities, like eating out with friends or seeing a movie.

 

“Poverty in a prosperous society usually does not mean living in rags on a dirt floor,” said Masami Iwata, a social welfare professor at Japan Women’s University in Tokyo. “These are people with cellphones and cars, but they are cut off from the rest of society.”

 

Years of deregulation of the labor market and competition with low-wage China have brought a proliferation of such low-paying jobs in Japan, economists say. Compounding matters is the fact that these jobs are largely uncovered by an outdated social safety net, created decades ago as a last resort in an era when most men could expect lifetime jobs.

 

This has opened up a huge crack through which millions of Japanese have fallen. One was Masami Yokoyama, 60, who lost his lifetime job a decade ago as he struggled with depression after a divorce. He held a series of increasingly low-paying jobs until three years ago, when he ended up homeless on Tokyo’s streets.

 

Still, city welfare officials rejected his application three times because he was still an able-bodied male. “Once you slip in Japan, there is no one to catch your fall,” said Mr. Yokoyama, who finally got limited government aid and found part-time work as a night watchman.

 

Gaining wide attention here are statistics showing that one in seven children lives in poverty, one reason the new government has pledged to offer monthly payments of $270 per child and to cut the cost of high school education.

 

Still, social workers say they fear that the poor will not be able to pay for cram schools and other expenses to enable their children to compete in Japan’s high-pressure education system, consigning them to a permanent cycle of low-wage work.

 

“We are at risk of creating a chronic underclass,” said Toshihiko Kudo, a board member of Ashinaga, a nonprofit group based in Tokyo that helps poor children and orphans.

 

Ms. Sato expressed similar fears for her daughter, Mayu. Mayu wants to go to a vocational school to become a voice actress for animation, but Ms. Sato said she could not afford the $10,000 annual tuition.

 

Still, she remains outwardly upbeat, if resigned. She said her biggest challenge was having no one to talk to. While she said she was sure that many other families faced a similar plight in this small city, their refusal to admit their poverty made it impossible to find them.

 

“In bed at night, I think: ‘How did I fall so far? How did I get so isolated?’ ” Ms. Sato said. “But usually, I try not to think about it.”

[to2leo]

Poverty is an ongoing issue since the dawn of time in every single country in the world.  However, the first step to address the matter is to have the courage to admit it.  It will be an interesting to see how Japan will tackle this 'hidden' issue.  Hopefully, if this issue is addressed, Japan will progress into looking at the real causes of why its economy is stagnate for more than a decade while other G8 nations grew in light of globalization.

[mbloes]

And while I haven't modeled any homeless areas, I have modeled blue tarp!

 

 

I just sprayed a plastic grocery bag with Tamiya "French blue" (I think).

[KenS]

Very nice. That's a realistic-looking tarp.  I'll have to remember that technique.

[inobu]

Wealth allots Poverty. It's indicative of cause and effect which no country is immune to.

 

Inobu