3/30/2009

Old Homeless At Street War With New Homeless Inside Japan. By Richard Lloyd Parry.

Old Homeless At Street War
With New Homeless Inside Japan.
By Richard Lloyd Parry.
Blog Edited By Uncle Monty.
~~~
It is unpleasant when newcomers lower the tone of
the neighbourhood and Tomitaka Iwamura was as
angry as anyone. There was the mess for a start -
open bags of rubbish left lying around by the new
arrivals. Then they started stealing from shops,
attracting the attention of the police and giving
everyone a bad name.
~~~
The last straw came when the interlopers began moving
in on the accommodation of longstanding residents such as
Mr Iwamura. “These new people just don't understand the
rules, and when that happened the boss got involved,” he
says. “He told them to leave. Sometimes physical force was
necessary.” None of this would be remarkable but for
one fact: Mr Iwamura is homeless.
~~~
For the past five months he has been living rough in a subway
tunnel under the Shinjuku district of central Tokyo. His boss is
homeless too - as are the interlopers they recently confronted.
Their story is part of a wider conflict between Japan's long-
established derelict population and a new wave of homeless
people taking to the streets as victims of the credit crunch.
~~~
Street Vendor of The Big Issue Japan.
~~~
Until recently, homelessness was the misfortune
of a small minority in Japan. According to official
figures, the country had 16,000 homeless last year,
less than two thirds the number counted five years
earlier, and they are the neatest, cleanest, most
unobtrusive homeless in the world.
~~~
They are overwhelmingly well behaved, rather cowed men
in their fifties and sixties. They live in railway stations and
subways and in shelters of cardboard and Tarpaulins, many
of them equipped with cooking stoves and even TVs powered
by car batteries. Hardly any actively beg, and drug abuse
and prostitution are almost unknown.
~~~
Many have been living on the street for the best part of a
decade or more, since the beginning of Japan's last recession
in the 1990s. Like the rest of Japanese society, they live in
an ordered hierarchy in conformity with strict social codes.
It is with this smoothly functioning world that a new
generation of destitutes is coming into conflict.
~~~
Mr Iwamura outlines the unwritten rules that govern life in
the Shinjuku subway, which became his home last October after
the bakery where he worked went bankrupt: once it has been
claimed, a sleeping space is sacred and never to be infringed
upon by another homeless person; never get into arguments
with police or security guards; use only discarded cardboard
boxes to construct shelters - never steal them from shops.
~~~
Gokuraka's Rough Sleeper Inside Japan
~~~
The homeless are meant to remain unobtrusive so as
not to attract the attention of the authorities. All of these
rules and more have been broken by the new homeless,
whose numbers have been surging since Japanese firms
began laying off contract workers at the end of last year.
~~~
“When you look for food in the bags outside McDonald's,
the rule is to open them, take just what you need and
close the bag neatly up again,” says Mr Iwamura, 42.
“These newcomers carry the bag away with them and
when they've finished just leave the rubbish spilling
everywhere.”
~~~
No one knows yet how many have taken to the streets
this year, but the indications are that the homeless population
is heading back towards record levels. “There are 900 people
here now, and normally we'd get 750 at this time of year,”
says Pastor Shim Won Suck, whose missionary group
handed out lunch in Tokyo's Ueno Park yesterday.
~~~
The new homeless are younger, angrier and unadjusted
to the conventions of life on the streets. As numbers
increase so, inevitably, does competition for food and
shelter. When conflict arises, homeless society has its
own way of resolving the problems.
~~~
In Mr Iwamura's neighbourhood of Shinjuku, the home-
less form loose groups led by a boss - who often derives
his authority from the yakuza - Japanese mafia. “We never
do it in front of ordinary people, but if there is one causing
trouble, then we deal with it,” Mr Iwamura says.
“He will be followed, and he will be attacked.”
~~~
~~~
Two Tokyo News Reporters
Then Curiously Came!
By Uncle Monty.
A couple of years ago, my good Irish and Japanese
fluent-speaking journalistic friend Mark Boyle, then
working for the National Japanese News Agency at
London, brought one day with him a couple of Tokyo
news reporters to interview me directly at my pitch
about the question of homelessness in Britain. At
that same time, the evidence was that the homeless
in Japan, and not in Britain, were constantly victim-
ised and roughed-up on the streets by physical
assaults and open verbal abuse by members
of the Japanese public. The stigma there
of homelessness was palpable.
~~~
Whenever I next see Mark (who is presently
based at the German capital of Bonn)), I will
ask him if such stigma and hostility toward the
homeless has now ameliorated somewhat due to
the increasing numbers of street homeless that
The Times' Tokyo correspondent Richard Lloyd
Parry cites in his news report on the conflict of
the old vs. the new homeless inside Japan. Mark
Boyle also later took the same two Tokyo news
reporters to interview The Big Issue head
honcho John Bird.
~~~
The newspaper reporters from Japan spoke no
English and so Mark took their questions and
translated them on the spot into English for me
and John. He then took our English answers
and instantly translated them into Japanese.
For abit, it was like being at the U.N. with
our own experienced interpreter at our side!
~~~
Later, I got the nice newsclipping of the inter-
view with us that Mark had then kindly trans-
lated from Japanese to English for me so that
I was able to read and understand the actual
news story about us. The press photos taken
of John Bird and me also appeared in the story
that was carried by Japan's mass circulation
daily called: The Hokkaido News.
~~~
That's just about as close as John Bird and
I will ever get to the grim reality and grow-
ing probelm of Japanese street home-
lessness, I sure guess.
~~~
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