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Monday, August 05, 2002

By Les Donison, Special to the Post-Gazette

OSAKA, Japan -- Hachiro Hirohata lives in the shadow of a castle, but his life is hardly that of a king.

	Homeless demonstrators listen to lawmakers speak in support of new laws to help the homeless during a rally last week in Tokyo. (Koji Sasahara, Associated Press)

His food is taken from trash cans, his drinking water from the taps of public washrooms. Children taunt him, often lobbing empty drink containers at his head and laughing as he scurries for cover. A sheet of cardboard splayed beneath the sloping overhang of a martial arts center passes for a bed. Sleep comes fitfully, when it comes at all.

Death is all he looks forward to.

"There's nothing else," sighs the 75-year-old ex-construction worker. He's a small, frail man with sore joints and a weak heart. His few teeth are stained in shades of yellow and black.

A handful of foreign tourists meander past, heading for stately Osaka Castle. They pretend not to notice Hirohata standing next to his own cardboard palace.

"I just want to go to another world," he says softly.

Japan's homeless population barely exceeded 1,000 during the economic heydays of the 1980s. Unemployment was almost zero.

Today, after a decade of slow growth and recession, unemployment is over 5 percent and more than 25,000 people are living on the streets, with thousands more teetering on the brink.

Japan's homeless problem remains tiny compared with other countries -- homeless Americans, for example, number more than 2 million -- but it is a hot issue on this prosperous island nation of 130 million simply because it is now too obvious to ignore.

"I don't expect the situation to improve quickly," predicts the Rev. Hitoshi Akiyama, a Lutheran minister who works with the homeless in Osaka.

The Japanese recession is an odd creature. Stroll the major shopping districts and one is apt to wonder, "What's all the fuss?" Money is everywhere. Young women parade in the latest designer fashions. Young men in wraparound shades prowl the streets in polished BMWs and Mercedes. The $5 cup of coffee remains ubiquitous.

It's a mirage, of course. The economic miracle has turned to a morass, and the evidence is sky blue. That's the color of the tarpaulins once seen primarily at building sites but now in widespread use as makeshift tents for the homeless.

Several hundred "blue homes" are hidden in a thick stand of trees crowding the outer edge of Osaka Castle Park.

Hideki Uemura strings a clothesline between two trees as the late-morning temperature pushes 90 degrees. His workday is complete; he was up at 5 a.m. and collected about 2,000 yen ($16) in recyclable cans and bottles. That's his average daily take, he says, enough to eat and buy cigarettes.

Uemura, 47 and single, is stinging in his criticism of the situation. He blames himself.

When the economy was good, day jobs on construction sites were easy to find, he says. He could work whenever he wanted, maintain an apartment and spend a lot of time and money betting on horses and playing Pachinko, a kind of vertical slot machine wildly popular in Japan.

When the work dried up, so did Uemura's free-and-easy lifestyle. He has been without a home for five years.

"It's my fault," he says. "I know that."

Uemura's is a rare sentiment. Government is often charged with doing little to alleviate homelessness. As a result, skepticism surrounds a bill now before the Diet, Japan's national legislative body, that calls for national and local governments to aid the homeless by creating jobs and subsidizing housing.

"[The bill] is only a small light at the end of a dark tunnel," says Akiyama.

Current programs are clearly inadequate. In Osaka, about 3,000 homeless are registered in a street-cleaning program for those ages 55 and over. But because only 250 jobs are available each day, Akiyama says, participants are limited to two $50-workdays a month, hardly enough to provide food, let alone accommodation.

Jobs for those on unemployment's doorstep used to be abundant in a part of Osaka called Kamagasaki. Long a home to gangsters, prostitutes and drugs, Kamagasaki was also where, during the boom years, people like Hirohata and Uemura could easily find work as day laborers in construction and on the docks.

The gangsters, prostitutes and drugs are still there. The jobs aren't.

Not even Kyoto, the nation's urban jewel, is immune to the blue wave.

Hide Nakajima once ran the presses for a Kyoto printing company, churning out magazines, posters and pamphlets. He vacationed in Hawaii with friends.

Three years ago the company downsized. Nakajima lost his job. His savings survived until last December.

Now 39, Nakajima lives beneath one of the many bridges spanning Kyoto's Kamo River. His self-made home is a simple, wood-frame box -- 4 feet high and covering an area the size of a single bed. Inside are a few shelves, a small table, a hot plate, cooking utensils, books and a blurry, palm-sized television. The exterior, like the dozens of other homes along the river, is wrapped in a blue tarp.

"This is just a short break in the middle of my life," Nakajima says over coffee outside his home. "In the future I'm going to have my own restaurant. I can do it."

When and how are questions answered with silence.

Some suggest Japan's burgeoning homeless population symbolizes a more profound problem. They say that in Japan's post-war haste to rebuild, traditional values like honor, respect, teamwork and taking care of the less fortunate were either ignored or forgotten.

Violent crime and divorce rates are up. The education system is under attack as onerous and inefficient. The police aren't trusted; politicians are trusted even less. People are sickened by the scandal-of-the-week nature of Japan's decision-making institutions.

Kyoto activist Jinan Honda says it's time for the Japanese workforce to look elsewhere for ideas. He points to the Netherlands, where job-sharing --- a system where workers shorten their hours to create more opportunities for the unemployed -- helped revive a floundering economy a decade ago.

A handful of Japanese companies are experimenting with the Dutch model. By and large, however, the "karoshi" mentality [work-till-you-drop] still pervades the business culture.

"Even if you want to avoid overwork by switching to a part-time job," Honda said, "your wages drop and all of your workplace privileges disappear. If you continue to overwork, you end up dead. This way of working must change, but Japan's problem is it can't change."

In the streets of Kamagasaki, change can't come soon enough for the hundreds of homeless lined up in late afternoon for a small bowl of rice gruel on offer by a local charity. Later, more than a thousand will trek to a nearby shelter in hopes of securing one of the 600 beds available for the evening.

Masayuki Tokuhara earns about $25 a day working at the shelter. It's enough for food, a tiny apartment and not much else. He's not complaining; last year, he was sleeping on cardboard in a nearby park.

"I want to be an optimist," says Tokuhara, 54, "so I try not to think about what will happen if I become homeless again."

He may soon find out. City council established this shelter in March 2000. Believing it would empty as the economy improved, council promised concerned neighborhood businesses and residents that the shelter would operate just three years. Instead, the economy worsened and demand for beds soared. The shelter's fate is likely to be decided by city officials later this year.

Food and shelter aren't the only concerns of the homeless.

Early this year in Tokyo, five youths beat a homeless man to death -- a day after he scolded them for making noise in a library. Another homeless Tokyo man was severely burned after a crude bomb exploded in a garbage can as he fished for food. Last year, in Osaka, youths murdered a homeless man by tossing him off a bridge.

"People are cold," says Nakajima, the homeless man in Kyoto. "Because we have no home they think we're lazy and don't want to work. I used to think the same thing, though."

Back near Osaka Castle, Hirohata leans on a broom next to his tiny piece of cardboard real estate.

"I have no money, no hobbies," he says. "There's nothing I can do. I can't even pick bottles. My body won't take it. I never imagined this kind of thing would happen to me."

Les Donison is a Canadian freelance journalist based in Avonlea, Saskatchewan.