Places, Images, Times & Transformations

Down But Not Out: Homelessness in Japan

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The government also, amid much protest, evacuated hundreds of homeless people from one corridor of a busy train station in Tokyo to make room for a moving sidewalk that would help commuters get to work a minute or two faster.

Unlike in the U.S. or the U.K., where the president or royal family may, especially around Christmas time, schedule photo-ops to exhibit themselves aiding the homeless and the poor, Japanese government officials and members of the imperial family do not participate in such activities. The "special clean-ups" that the authorities conducted nearly every month in Ueno Park and other parts of Tokyo exemplify their approach. State and local officials chose a day each month to remind the homeless people squatting in tents that they were living illegally in the parks. They then issued a warning: the homeless must evacuate by a certain date or risk being dispossessed of their belongings. On the assigned day, park management, police, or local officials would survey the area to make sure all the tents had been removed. Yet the homeless people living in the area, while usually following the instructions to move out on the specified day, simply returned to their sites and rebuilt their tents as soon as the officials retreated to their offices. The next month they would all repeat the performance.

"Doing Homeless"

These special clean-ups, while seen as a means of maintaining the health of the parks by the local authorities, were seen more simply as part of "doing homeless" by the homeless people themselves. While they might not have agreed with the authorities, many homeless persons took pride in their ability to complete the clean-up with efficiency and style. Some would even harshly critique their neighbors during the event: "Look at how much unnecessary stuff he has," one man scornfully pointed out regarding a neighbor. "And look at the state of his boxes: what are we to think of his state of mind?" These criticisms reveal much about how these men believed homeless should be done.

Homeless people in Ueno Park usually used the word "homeless" in a phrase with the verb "to do": hōmuresu o suru, literally "to do homeless." And their description of how homeless was to be properly and virtuously done made clear that homelessness was not a mere survival strategy. It was not just a means of getting by. It was more complicated than that. Doing homeless was the means through which homeless people rejected their social marginality and displayed their morality, hard work, determination, honor, perseverance, and manliness. Doing homeless in this way, a way that allowed homeless people to live up to mainstream values and establish standards of behavior for themselves and their neighbors, demonstrates that people living in the margins do not necessarily oppose mainstream values. Thus, homeless people's narratives of doing homeless call into question many popular ideas about homelessness as a form of deviance, a survival tactic, or a rejection of the broader society.

The phrase "doing homeless" not only challenges the popular association of homelessness with idleness and deviance, but forces the question: how is homeless done? In some ways, this is best answered by starting with how it is not done.

Because Ueno Park is up on a hill and was historically called the "mountain" or yama, homeless people living in the park referred to themselves as "people of the mountain" (yama no ningen). And they distinguish their identity as "people of the mountain" from other homeless people who lived more nomadically-"down there" (shita no hō)-in other parts of the park or city where permanent tents were prohibited. As people of the mountain, the homeless in Ueno viewed themselves as having a work ethic, a sense of pride, and a livelihood that contrasted with that of the homeless who lived "down there." Often it was pointed out to me the way in which people from shita no hō queue for soup lines, don't cook with stoves, have dirty skin, don't do laundry, and make no effort to "properly" do homeless.

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