Japanese Banks Provide Homes for Refugees

[GuyJean]

[floatl][/floatl]Impoverished Refugees Flood Japanese Cities
CNET - Mobile Ojisan

You think poverty does not fit the image of Japan? Wrong. Poverty in Japan can't be swept under the carpet anymore. It's getting more visible everyday. Of course, Japanese poverty is not that absolute like you find in South Asia or backwater rural China. Even in the most hopeless situation, no Japanese poor lacks some grains of rice in the rice cooker. Nevertheless, poverty is poverty. You can't deny it.

Even out favorite Akihabara streets hide quite a few numbers of urban poverty cases, homeless people. Probably you saw some of them the last time you visited this fairy land of this world. A scruffy guy or two who were pulling a handcart laden to the brim with empty carton boxes collected from Akiba shops. These elderly people earn a small fee by recycling them, and live rough in the park or under the bridge.

Japanese homeless people are, mostly, middle-aged and older. The cruel economy is especially harsh to these senior people. Their lifeline, unskilled construction job category, dwindled out. When they were "restructured", it was almost impossible to reverse the downward drift.

But how about the young and poor? There is a huge layer of extremely poor young people in the urban environment. Called "Freeter" (coined from "free" and "arbiter"), they move from one temp job to another that pays a near starvation wage and ample supply of instability and uncertainty. Unlike their elderly counterparts, they never lack the chance of finding a job, if they don't complain too much.

But you rarely see those poor young sleeping rough in the open air. They have special habitat for this purpose. The Internet cafe.. .. more..

Hey, Captain. Didn't you have an article like this a few years ago?..

GJ

[GuyJean]

Hey, Captain. Didn't you have an article like this a few years ago?..

Yep. Found it:

As the Economy Wanes Tokyo Homelessness Grows
http://www.bigempire.com/sake/homeless.html

... Minoru (not wishing to give his family name) is homeless. Collecting and selling these items is one of his jobs - maybe more accurately, one of his means of survival. He is one of hundreds of similar folk who have been relegated to setting up abodes on the concrete terrace of the Sumida River beneath a massive expressway in Eastern Tokyo's Chuo Ward.

Here, and for intermittent stretches along the river, homeless villages have sprung up. Nearly permanent structures composed of a mixture of tents, wood pallets, cardboard, and blue tarps sit at the river's edge.

Even though international news reports often speak of Japan's stagnating economy as a "golden recession" by detailing Tokyo's still extremely high standard of living and endless consumer excess, the existence of homeless people is slowly encroaching inward from the outskirts of the capital. Where once easy to ignore, the blue tarps - the signature item of Japan's homeless - are now turning up in nearly all of Tokyo's larger parks and along its riverbanks.

"At first, I didn't know how to get by," Minoru says of his homeless beginnings one year before. "I was eating grass and bugs."

Now he has adapted.

He prepares coffee, warming his hands on the kerosene heater, with fellow homeless buddy, 55-year old Sadami, sitting next to him on their brown vinyl couch. Two dome camping tents, one being camouflage, provide bookends at either side of their assortment of collected goods: pots, gas burners, generators, folding chairs, ceramic dishes, clothing racks, fishing poles, bicycles, pushcarts, and even seemingly insignificant items like ashtrays.

"Japanese people always throw away perfectly good stuff," laughs Minoru.... more..

GJ