13
Subversive Accommodations
Doing Homeless in Tokyo’s Ueno Park
I am frequently asked two questions when I introduce the topic of homelessness in Tokyo. The first is, Are there really homeless people in Japan? When I answer in the affirmative, the second question inevitably follows: How did you become involved with them? I begin with these questions because, even more than their answers, they reveal much about the popular perception and contemporary context of homelessness in Tokyo. The questions, and the tone of curiosity in which they are asked, demonstrate two sorts of cultural common sense. First, they demonstrate a widespread assumption about Japan that presupposes all Japanese are middle class. Second, they demonstrate a common view of homelessness that assumes homeless people are socially different. I am also frequently asked if the homeless in Japan are even Japanese at all: Aren’t they mostly foreigners? Of course, this misconception, like the others, is not true; but it points to the near incapability of imagining a homeless Japanese. Underlying all these questions are ideas that homeless people are somehow cut off from conventional society, do not follow cultural norms of behavior, and therefore live in states of disorientation or disorder.
Opening a discussion of the homeless in Japan, then, necessitates a rethinking of understandings of marginality, and of the behaviors and identities of those who live in the so-called margins of society. The very word homeless seems to shove homeless people into the peripheries of society, dislodging them from a broader cultural context. This is especially true in Japan where the home (ie) is frequently argued to be central to both self and national identity.1 Homelessness poses a unique problem for the study of Japan because it challenges well-established notions of Japanese identity, which locate that identity in the sedentary spheres of the home and work. The very existence of homeless people offends official descriptions of Japanese identity.2 Karen Kelsky recently noted, “The status of the nonnormative is particularly vexed in the context of Japan anthropology, which to a large extent has depended on, and indeed tirelessly reproduced, normative constructs of ‘Japanese culture.’”3 In this normative construction of Japanese identity, an individual’s position within the institutions of work and home has been called the zero-point of entry into Japanese society. If home and work are truly the starting points of Japanese social identity, it follows that the homeless, composed mostly of single, unemployed men, have no entryway. Yet, ethnographic research with homeless people in Tokyo, and exploration into the ways in which they construct their own identities, complicates their presumed disaffiliation from and marginality in Japanese culture. The following discussion of homelessness in Tokyo is meant to provoke a reexamination of the categories of Japanese cultural inquiry and to collapse the distinctions between inside and outside (uchi/soto), self and other, and home and away that tend to dominate that inquiry. Yet, while the chapter is meant to provoke a challenge to normative ideas of Japanese identity, it is careful not to assume that homeless identities and activities deviate from the norm. That does not mean this chapter should be read as an attempt to normalize homelessness. It makes no suggestion that rather than part of a marginalized culture, homeless people are part of a broader Japanese culture. Instead, this chapter reveals the flexibility and innovative use of cultural ideals by individuals as they live their lives, negotiate their identities, and “do homeless” in Ueno Park. By showing how homeless people in Tokyo do not match the broader image of their otherness, this chapter demonstrates that that thinking in terms of centers and margins ultimately obscures more than it reveals. This is not to deny that structures of power work through such paradigms, but to suggest scholars and others be very careful as to what they think marginality might mean and what kinds of predictive power such a perspective might have. Rather than viewing homeless people as different, the goal of this chapter is to explore how they might help us think differently about marginality, homelessness, and Japan. This is not the first attempt to think differently about this subject matter; but this chapter, too, is critical of some common alternative perspectives on homeless people that view homelessness as either a survival tactic or resistance practice. It argues that survival and resistance are equally insufficient concepts for representing homeless lifestyles. That is, while homeless people do not simply behave unconventionally, neither do they merely adapt to fit their impoverished situations or behave only in ways that demonstrate opposition to conventional ideas of family, work, and gender.
This chapter looks at the representations of homelessness in both popular opinion and in the ethnographic writing of anthropologists, before turning to examine the ways in which homeless people with whom I researched in Tokyo’s Ueno Park articulated the meaning of homelessness in their own lives, best expressed in their phrase doing homeless (hoomuresu o suru). It is this discourse of doing homeless that I suggest offers interesting ground for broadening our understandings of homelessness, marginality, and Japanese identity.
Homelessness in Japan
The first national government survey of Japan’s homeless people conducted in 2003 lists about 25,300 homeless persons living in Japan, with approximately six thousand homeless living in Tokyo’s twenty-three wards. The majority of Japan’s homeless are men over fifty years of age, with an average age of about fifty-six, who have been living in tents, train stations, parks, riversides, and on the streets for an average total of forty-nine months.4 Women reportedly make up only 3 percent of the national homeless population; but, according to Ueno Park management, 5 percent of the homeless in the park were women (activist groups estimated up to 10 percent). One study points out that while “it is obvious from the data . . . that the vast majority of [homeless people in Japan] are male . . . characterizing the phenomenon as ‘male,’ has ensured that the number of females recorded as homeless is low or completely absent.”5 Furthermore, by “identifying only those living on the streets as homeless” the census insures that the total number is undercounted. Because the population is mobile, and sometimes hidden in temporary dormitories, on friends’ futons, or in cheap motels, it is clear that total numbers cannot be exact. Yet, both government and advocate polls report that the numbers of homeless have been steadily increasing since the early 1990s. Still, activists’ estimates were much higher; based on their experiences with “night patrols,” many claimed there were ten thousand homeless people in Tokyo alone.
Many of the recently homeless in Tokyo fell out of the informal day labor system that flourished in postwar Japan. These were men who in their youth were tempted from the countryside by job opportunities in the city but who eventually found themselves jobless due to economic decline, the shift to a service economy, new recruiting strategies, and their own advancing age.6 Still other men are homeless due to failed loans or corporate restructuring. The history of homeless women in Tokyo is much less well documented. Among the women of Ueno Park, most came to the streets from broken marriages and prolonged states of poverty or illness. Since there is little work opportunity without a fixed address, and since most landlords demand six months’ rent to be paid in advance for an apartment, once homeless there are very few possibilities for gaining steady employment or obtaining a permanent residence.
In many parks throughout Tokyo, homeless people lived in tents that they constructed out of blue plastic tarps. There were approximately three hundred such tents in Ueno Park when I conducted research in 1998–99. Most homeless people lived alone in their tents but, including the number of persons sleeping on benches, under awnings, and on the surrounding streets, there were approximately one thousand to twelve hundred homeless people in the Ueno area. Homeless people in Ueno Park supported themselves through the activities of doing homeless, which included recycling, scavenging, occasional day labor, resale of found items, and maintaining personal relationships. Homeless persons tented in Ueno Park did not panhandle. Nor did most attend the church-run sermon and food handout that came to the park several times a week and attracted up to one thousand persons from the surrounding areas. These were not simply economic choices; rather they reflect the moral meanings of doing homeless. Homeless people in Ueno Park prided themselves in their self-sufficiency, honor, and perseverance. In other words, doing homeless was not just about pursuing particular types of labor; it included disciplining these jobs, and each other, with broader cultural virtues of hard work, sincerity, and obligation to others.
On mornings when I would arrive in Ueno Park for a day of fieldwork I was often greeted with a mock-scolding hima da naa, “you sure have lots of free time.” Some wondered out loud if I should not instead be at school or if I would ever complete my “report” with all the time I spent in the park. I was constantly made to pay attention to virtues like hard work, sincerity, and reciprocity as the means of introducing and proving myself, and as the currency through which to meet new people. These virtues served as the grounds on which Tokyo’s homeless people articulated their lifestyle (seikatsu) of doing homeless and through which I came to understand how it should be properly done (expressed as either shikkari suru or chyanto suru). It was by appealing to culturally sanctioned ideals that homeless persons would judge each other, and the ethnographer. Does he keep his tent neat? Does he persevere (gambaru) at his recycling, scavenging, or other work? Does he properly greet his neighbors? Is he attuned to other’s feelings? In other words, is he fit enough to do homeless? The answers to these questions guided their evaluations of who was good at doing homeless and with whom they might establish relationships. The questions I found homeless persons asking themselves were very different from the kinds of questions other researchers were asking. Homeless people in Ueno were concerned with doing homeless, while researchers were more concerned with how individuals become homeless and with how they survive in that presumed otherworldly lifestyle. Doing homeless and homeless people’s elaborations on how it should be done, then, are grossly at odds with both scholarly approaches and popular representations of homeless people as disaffiliated, lazy, and outside the moral and cultural values of society. Still, an imagery of otherness proliferates in both Japanese and Western popular representations of homeless people. As Kim Hopper has written on homelessness in the United States, “Whether construed as civilization’s exile, its nemesis, or as evidence of its failure, [notions of the homeless person are] built on a prior refusal to recognize him as part of the inclusive world of the observer.”7 Let me offer some examples of this exclusion in the Japanese case.
Typical news headlines about the homeless include such titles as “The Other Japan,” “The Other Side of the Coin,” “Down and Out in Tokyo” (or Osaka, or Kobe), and, perhaps most poignantly, “The Unsalaried Man,” which plays on the term salaryman as Japan’s prototypical (male) worker.8 These headlines, which invert the symbols of Japaneseness (and Japanese masculinity), serve to reduce homelessness to a negative identity. The homeless are, by popular headline anyway, what Japan and its archetypal salarymen are not. These representations, in turn, have a real effect on the lives of homeless people in Tokyo. Certainly this imagery of otherness helps explain why homeless men are often targets of violence. There are reports of school children and others verbally harassing them, striking them with rocks and firecrackers, knifing them, and setting them on fire. In fact 39 percent of Tokyo’s homeless people say they have experienced some kind of discrimination or attack.9 While there are also reports of homeless people committing abuses against each other, one rarely if ever reads that a homeless person was violent toward a local resident. Still these same residents frequently complain, especially when protesting a shelter rumored to be built in their neighborhood, that the homeless make local areas unsafe for women and children.10 Such complaints further exemplify the way in which homeless people are popularly viewed as “others” to be feared.
The Japanese government also contributes to this view. It was not until 1995 that the Tokyo metropolitan government issued its first report on homelessness (though it based its findings on what it called “previous research”). The report states, “there are people who have homes in their hometowns who live on the street in the city. In these instances, it can be possible that they choose to live on the street.”11 Following this report, Tokyo’s then governor, Yukio Aoshima, announced that homeless people, “have particular views of life and philosophy. They want to be left alone.”12 In other words, without any contemporary investigation, the governor declared homeless peoples’ “peculiarity” responsible for their living on the street.
The governor’s comments quickly became a rallying quote for the homeless social movement. Homeless support groups and activist leaders began to conduct their own surveys and produce knowledge that demonstrated homeless people were still interested in working. More important, they linked the homeless problem with the day labor market and the postbubble economy that not only left the aging itinerant worker population unemployed but also denied their contributions to the previous economic rise of Japan. Supporters of homeless people in Japan began to refer to them as homeless laborers, and to challenge perceptions of the homeless as others, like that by Governor Aoshima, by linking the homeless problem directly to the political economy and current recession that was affecting the whole of Japan.
Until 2000, the government took little more than cosmetic measures to meet the “homeless problem.” What limited relevant public policy did exist was aimed at laborers, not the homeless. While there were government-supported welfare, health, and day labor–related policies that applied to some homeless individuals, usually the very sick or the very old, there was almost no policy specific to homelessness in Tokyo. The metropolitan government still persists with a hands-off approach toward the issue of homelessness. Traditionally its policies have been aimed at cosmetically hiding or confining homelessness to day labor communities, while providing limited emergency assistance for unemployed laborers in those communities.13 Access to dorms, like two temporary structures that were opened in Tokyo only for the three winter months, was reserved for registered laborers who could demonstrate that they were still living in the yoseba, or day labor community. Other services, like yearly bonuses and public works, were also reserved strictly for registered “working” laborers. Of course, even laborers who were working in the yoseba often were not officially registered, so the measures reflect the government’s effort to define the deserving poor and to control where they should live. Official actions beyond the day labor neighborhoods include nailing wooden blocks in the center of park benches to keep homeless people from sleeping there, and turning off the water at public drinking fountains to discourage homeless people from gathering and bathing in public. The metropolitan administration also, amid much protest, evacuated hundreds of homeless people from one corridor of Shinjuku station, Tokyo’s busiest train station, to make room for a moving sidewalk that it claimed would help commuters get to work faster. During these highly contested evictions, administrators framed homeless people as environmental hazards and vagrants and further defended their evacuation as part of an environmental cleanup.
Unlike in the United States or Britain, where the president or members of the royal family may, especially around Christmas time, schedule photo ops to exhibit themselves aiding the homeless and poor, the Japanese government and imperial family members do not even pretend to participate in such activities. The “special cleanups” that the police and park management conducted in Ueno Park exemplify the official Japanese approach. Ueno Park rests on land that is still owned by the imperial family. The former temple grounds were given to the people in the last quarter of the nineteenth century, as a gift from the emperor, and relandscaped as public space in an effort to make Tokyo look more like a Western city. The park is currently the site of several museums, shrines, and temples and is a destination for both national and international tourists. The emperor, as the cultural head of state, comes to Ueno Park to view traveling artworks or for other events, sometimes as frequently as once a month. State and local officials, in preparation for those visits, would remind homeless people squatting in tents that they were living in the park illegally. They would issue a warning: all homeless people must evacuate by a certain date or risk being dispossessed of their belongings. On the assigned day, park management, police, and other local officials would parade through the park, surveying to make sure all the tents had been removed. In fact, they would conduct a rehearsal of the cleanup three days before the imperial visit and then on the assigned day carry out the “real thing.” Homeless people living in the park usually followed the instructions to move out on the specified day. This was seen as part of properly doing homeless. While they might not have agreed with the authorities, many homeless persons I met took pride in their ability to complete the cleanup with efficiency and style. Some would even harshly criticize their neighbors during the event: “Look at how much unnecessary stuff he has,” one man scornfully pointed out of a neighbor. And his companion went on, “and look at the state of his boxes. What are we to think of his internal state of mind?” These criticisms revealed much about how these men believed homeless should be done. Still, as soon as the officials retreated to their offices, the homeless residents simply returned to their sites and rebuilt their tents. The next month, they would all repeat the performance. This monthly routine demonstrates how officials in Japan treat homeless people as an unsightly problem, certainly not to be seen when the emperor comes to visit his otherwise beautiful park.
The academic literature (even writing that is sympathetic) has also seized upon these notions of fundamental difference. Tom Gill compares entering a Japanese day labor community (doyagai), where many homeless people live in Japan, to entering a foreign country.14 Gill claims residents there “consider themselves ‘outside’ society . . . [and] place themselves at the center of an alternative moral universe.”15 He goes on to argue that “everyone in the doya-gai was an outsider . . . they presented the doya-gai as a place for ‘uncrafted selves,’ to modify Kondo (1990)—unpolished nuggets of selfhood.”16 With words like unpolished nuggets, Gill seems to suggest that homeless identities are not only unrefined, wild, and untouched by cultural constraints, but partial and incomplete. To understand Gill’s perspective some background is necessary about the history of Japanese studies and its tireless pursuit to document enduring patterns and norms of Japanese behavior. In this context, studies of homelessness, along with those of minorities in Japan, have come to hold particular significance for the project of critiquing widely held notions of Japanese uniqueness and homogeneity. That is, studies of homeless people clearly disrupt conventional ideas of what it means to be Japanese. They do not fit the model of vertical society, or the icon of the work-driven salaryman. It is true, as suggested by Gill and others,17 that day labor communities offer fertile ground for rethinking such notions, but this is not simply because of the communities’ inherent foreignness. I argue that it is a mistake to turn a lack of stable employment and family networks into a rendering of homeless people as culturally other and classifiably different. Scholars must take the challenge further and look at how these “different” others take up the more conventional discourses of Japanese identity. Here, anthropology offers crucial insights into Japan studies.
The Anthropology of Homelessness
While anthropologists have in some ways contributed to the concept of homelessness as otherly, anthropology also has a long history of responding to the view of homeless people as deviant and disorderly. Many anthropologists have used the concept of culture as the key means by which to present a more empathetic view of homeless persons. Stemming from Oscar Lewis’s concept of the “culture of poverty,”18 as well as anthropology’s functionalist roots, writings on homelessness in American anthropology often attempt to present homelessness as an orderly culture or subculture and, through ethnographic methods, to provide an insider’s point of view on that culture. Unfortunately, this approach can distance the homeless even as it attempts to bring them into better focus. For example, James Spradley, in his classic ethnography You Owe Yourself a Drunk, argues that “the distance between most Americans and urban nomads cannot be measured in miles; they are separated from us by cultural distance.”19 His book, in an embrace of cultural relativism, attempted to demonstrate that homeless drunks in Seattle, contrary to popular belief, were not unruly and irrational but operated with cultural logic. This perspective was an important response to earlier views of the homeless as lacking in social order and incapable of rational behavior, and certainly it was an improvement on simply dismissing homeless people as beyond culture. Yet, it overlooked homeless people’s intimate connections with the mainstream. Instead, Spradley, and others whom we might associate with the culture-of-poverty school, emphasized how the homeless and poor are enculturated into a wholly different, if equally meaningful, system.
One answer to the shortcomings of the culture of poverty studies has been to focus on the structural causes of homelessness, the political economy, and the marginalizing structures of race, class, and gender. These approaches reject a core principle in the culture of poverty concept—that the poor are isolated and engulfed by a wholly separate cultural ethos. A structural perspective focuses alternatively on the history of labor and race relations and other complex structural causes of homelessness. Its usefulness is found in that it keeps us from blaming and isolating the individual. Instead of suggesting that, once homeless, people learn a new set of ideals and behaviors, structural analysis looks at the situations and behaviors of homeless individuals as intimately linked and responsive to broader social institutions and ideologies of race, class, and gender. But, as Philippe Bourgois reminds us, structural “analysis is not a panacea to compensate for individualistic, racist, or otherwise judgmental interpretations of social marginalization. In fact, a focus on structures often obscures the fact that humans are active agents of their own history, rather than passive victims.”20 Contemporary studies of the homeless and the poor are, then, caught up in the debates between structure and agency. Did class, racial, ethnic, and gender discrimination cause their homelessness? Or was it their own failures? Joanne Passaro points out what is missing from research surrounding this debate: “an analysis of the process of remaining homeless, as opposed to becoming houseless.”21
The ongoing, back-and-forth debate between structure and agency ultimately raises the question, can there be other possibilities for homeless agency? Many researchers see resistance as one such possibility and have turned to the notion of resistance as a remedy for both the failures of the culture concept and the structural approach.22 The notion of resistance has been taken up as a cure-all to get around the debates between structure and agency, and in many ways it has pushed the conversation further. The idea of resistance turns our attention to the unevenness of culture, to the complexities of power and domination, and to the subtleties of human agency, given structural forms of repression. However, resistance too is a limiting concept. By looking at the way in which marginalized individuals either resist or accommodate dominant values we often fail to recognize that the two might look the same. A focus on resistance runs the risk of overlooking those practices that appear wholly ordinary. Furthermore, perspectives on resistance often limit the expression of resistance to those forms that reject dominant values. Perhaps resistance, at least as it is usually conceived, is not the only possibility for new representations of homeless agency. While it successfully demonstrates that marginalized individuals are not isolated, it limits their dialogue with broader society to an oppositional mode. Is opposition the only form resistance might take? I argue that in a situation of marginalization, where those in the margins are popularly expected to act as deviants, an effective form of resistance may be the embrace of dominant values.
Doing Homeless: A New Perspective
In the phrase doing homeless, the verb do itself begins to open up new discussions on homelessness; it challenges the association of homelessness with idleness, as expressed in the usual phrasing, becoming homeless. More important, homeless people’s elaborations on how homeless is properly done challenge scholars, journalists, and activists to examine the limitations of the conceptual frameworks—be it deviance, subculture, survival strategy, or resistance—that reign in the homeless literature. Doing homeless is not doing whatever one can just to get by, but a way of living up to the ideals of reciprocity, discipline, and national identity. Furthermore, as a discourse of hard work, honor, perseverance, and conventional masculinity, doing homeless demonstrates that agency in the margins does not necessarily oppose mainstream values.
The phrase doing homeless not only rejects the association of homelessness with idleness, 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 (yama), homeless people living in the park referred to themselves as people of the mountain (yama no ningen), and distinguish their identity from other homeless who lived more nomadically, “down there” (shita no hoo) in other parts of the park or city where permanent tents were prohibited. As people of the mountain, homeless people in Ueno associated themselves with a romanticized and idealized rice-based diet, work ethic, pride, and livelihood, and contrasted these markers of identity with the homeless from “down there,” off the mountain.23 Often it was pointed out to me the way in which people from shita no hoo queue for soup lines, eat bread crusts, do not cook with stoves, have dirty skin, do not do laundry, and make no effort to “properly” do homeless. Their “improper” and “bad” behaviors were then associated with having less pride, determination, and commitment and therefore with being lesser persons, lesser homeless, and lesser Japanese. Of course the homeless down there similarly dismiss the homeless above, claiming that they are the ones who have given up and given in to homelessness. These more nomadic homeless view the tents as a symbol of giving up the job search and of a commitment to remain on the streets. Thus, making others deviant works in both directions: both tented and nomadic homeless projected ideas of difference, deviance, and otherness onto each other in order to demonstrate their own integrity.
Those homeless people from the mountain who went to collect food and recyclables in the nearby shopping arcade at night often complained to me about homeless people from down there passing through, making a mess of the trash that businesses neatly set out on the curb, and jeopardizing the relationships they claimed to respect with shop owners. They viewed these ill-mannered bums (kojiki) as undisciplined, unable to properly scavenge, and unconcerned with human relationships. For example, Kokusai, a man in Ueno Park who called himself a tent-lifestyler (tento seikatsusha) explained how his lifestyle was different than a lifestyle of sleeping on the streets (rojoo seikatsu): “The color of their face is different; it is darker from being in the sun and from not bathing. . . . They don’t have a stove, hot food, or a change of clothes. One can tell just by looking who has a tent or not.” Kokusai’s neighbor added that those without tents were constipated and could not sleep because they had no fixed schedule or place to rest—the very rhythms and appearance of their bodies were seen as unpredictable and disrupted by their nomadism and instability.
By contrast, yama no ningen insisted, whether they labored, recycled, or scavenged, that they do it adamantly and properly (shikkari suru), with all their effort (gambaru). I spent many hours listening to ways in which one could better tie newspapers, more efficiently crush cans, or perfect the method of sifting through garbage. This is significant because gambaru (to persevere) is an activity that the dominant discourse, as in Governor Aoshima’s quote earlier, claims that the homeless, in particular, do not do. The governor suggested that it is precisely because homeless people do not persevere that they “become” homeless. Yet, rejecting this sentiment, one man in Ueno argued, “The only reason we are here is because we gambaru. That is the only reason we are alive.” Thus, he recast the notion that the tents represented shame or failure and claimed they stood as a testament to an effort and willingness to persevere.
Among the tented homeless in Ueno Park, it was precisely productivity and activity that lent legitimacy to put up a tent in the park’s limited space. Oneesan, a rather influential woman in the park, frequently complained of a neighbor who said that his only job was to sleep. “He should lose his homeless rights [hoomuresu no kenri],” she said. Almost no homeless person I met believed that they had legal rights to be in the park,24 so by rights she was referring to the rights that were gained through discipline and perseverance. In fact, just as the general population may view homelessness itself as an illness and the homeless as unfit, the Japanese homeless persons I talked to judged some of those among them as too weak or ill and unfit to properly do homeless in Ueno Park.
Consider the situation of two park residents, whom I call Neko and Kita. Both had tents in Ueno Park during my research. Neko had been living with her “husband” since her arrival six years prior (the husband had been there already for four years), while Kita arrived more recently, a few months into the research. Yet, despite her seniority and growing despair, it was Neko who was losing legitimacy and support from her neighbors in the park. Neko was from a rural hamlet of Aomori Prefecture, in the northernmost part of Honshu. As with many in Ueno, the story of her arrival is unclear; but Neko’s was particularly unclear because she spoke with a strong regional dialect, using Tokyo speech only for thank-you and other pleasantries, in an ironic tone that let you know it was merely performance. She was seventy-six years old and just over four feet tall. She was very energetic, kept a cat for a companion, sang folksongs almost constantly, and was well liked by those around her. She was consistently described as cute (kawaii). However, Neko had severe arthritis and a bladder control problem that necessitated more and more of her husband’s care. After a brief attempt to “pick up” (hirou) another woman to care for Neko, the husband left the park without a word. This left Neko to fend for herself. Her husband had made their money by selling frankfurters and snacks at a stall in front of the park shrine on the weekends, but Neko had no income of her own. Nor could she, with her arthritis, easily raise and lower her tent daily as the park management required,25 not to mention complete the more strenuous special cleanups to which they were subjected, with full rehearsal three days prior, about once a month. Even changing her clothes, doing laundry, and cooking were difficult chores. In other words, she could no longer do for herself. She had no one to take care of her and little money to pay someone else to do it. She was living mostly from church handouts, which marked her desperation. Most yama no ningen refused the church-run soup lines because they felt the church insulted them by making them listen to long sermons, feeding them soup-doused rice (which they called cat food), and, worst of all, giving to everyone and anyone anonymously. In true human relationships, many yama no ningen told me, offerings are mutually exchanged and given with words of acknowledgment, such as, You must have had a hard day (otsukaresama). But the church, “makes you sit, orates a long sermon, and gives to anyone who will listen.” Those doing homeless on the mountain viewed those who lined up, who “merely received without giving” and who did so in anonymity, as void of humanity, perseverance, and pride.
Lining up for the soup line in front of all the other park residents called out Neko’s situation. At first thinking her husband would come back, Neko’s neighbors took pity on her, commiserated with her view of her husband’s irresponsibility, and helped with her tent and meals. After all, the couple had seniority over other residents due to their age and tenure in Ueno Park. However, when it became clear that Neko’s husband was gone for good, the neighbors retreated. They felt it was Neko’s responsibility to do for herself. She was seventy-six years old, with illnesses that made her one of the few easy candidates for welfare.26 Certainly Neko had her pride, but it was time, her neighbors argued for her to do for herself. “One can not presume on others [amaenai],”27 Pu-chan, Neko’s neighbor, complained. “She may be pitiful [kawaisoo], but I have stopped helping her. Her tent smells horrible because she merely drops her clothes in water, without soap, and hangs them to dry. And the tent is full of roaches. I do not know what she is thinking.” Neko, in losing her independence and ability to do homeless, had lost her legitimacy and endangered her relationships on the yama, relationships of reciprocity that were judged crucial to properly doing homeless.
Kita, on the other hand, was younger than Neko. He was sixty-two years old and three years away from receiving his work pension.28 He left his home and job in a northern prefecture after the death of his wife. He took about two thousand U.S. dollars with him. He traveled and stayed in motels but was draining his resources fast. He had been staying in a room in Ueno when he first came to the yama. He saw all the tents, talked to some people, made some friends, and thought he would “give it a try.” He did not drink alcohol, or ever scavenge for food, or even do day labor, but he was quick to offer a cigarette and sometimes, or so I heard, even a loan. He did not cause a big nuisance (meiwake o kakenai). Most important, he did everything for himself. He was his own means of financial support and was able to raise and lower his tent and move it out on special cleanup days. Thus, even though he claimed and everyone knew that his plan for the immediate future was to return to his daughter’s home in the north, where she ran a country inn,29 Kita was self-sufficient and committed to his relationships and active on the mountain and, as a result, was seen as legitimate by his neighbors. He was, after all, properly doing homeless.
These cases make clear that among the homeless it was not the most downtrodden, the most down and out, who were seen as legitimate homeless. Rather it was the most productive, disciplined, and active who were judged as fit to do homeless and who therefore gained local legitimacy. The downtrodden were seen as candidates for welfare or other types of outside support. Thus, while most claimed they did not need or want governmental or institutional support, they recognized its importance for individuals for whom doing homeless was no longer a viable option. Yet these choices were seen as less preferable and those who opted for them were called beggars (kojiki) because these options reduced one’s sense of independence and called into question the ability to do for oneself. Commitment both to doing homeless and to relationships lent legitimacy in Ueno Park. Homeless people in Ueno Park discouraged each from talking about the difficulties and mistakes of their past that are often the key topics of scholars and others who are interested in how individuals “become” homeless. The homeless claimed to treat their current social relationships with utmost care, as a way to express their commitment to the ideals of duty, obligation, and reciprocity. “If I quit [doing homeless and scavenging food],” one man insisted, “others will suffer.”30 Commitment to doing homeless also brought praise. Oneesan described a man who lived near her and with whom she was involved in mutual exchanges: “Yes it is afternoon and he is sleeping. He drank too much sake from the cherry blossom festival. But he still goes out every night. In the rain, wind, or whatever. He goes to his place in Ochanomizu. Even a salaryman might say, not today, but this man, he goes every day.”
Rethinking Marginality and Resistance
Given popular, academic, and official notions of the homeless other, homeless people’s use of conventional notions of Japanese identity and virtues are challenging on two levels. First, they provide a critical challenge to national and academic discourses that celebrate corporations, home, and marriage as anchors of Japaneseness and as the decisive locations for the production of Japanese ideals. Second, they problematize the easy association of marginality with a “resistance” that is conceived of as nonhegemonic, subversive, and violating of the codes of conduct. Doing homeless proves to be neither a simple hidden transcript31 nor an unconscious reproduction of nationally sanctioned ideals. Understanding homelessness requires a more complicated view of otherness, marginality, and resistance: one that neither essentializes the homeless as outsiders, nor romanticizes them as treasures in the academic adventure to seek out diversity in Japan.
A discussion of homelessness in Ueno Park necessitates a rethinking of understandings of marginality and resistance. The common sense that led others to ask me questions about my research might predict that homeless persons reject, or are unconcerned with, social norms as they pursue life at the level of naked humanity. I am frequently asked to compare the homeless in Japan to homeless people elsewhere, but I wonder if that is the only or best point of comparison. Is homelessness the only key marker of their personal identity?
The importance that ideologically thick and nationally salient symbols play in yama no ningen’s own narratives of doing homeless demonstrates that marginality and resistance are not sufficient concepts for understanding homelessness in Tokyo, as they do not seem to consider homeless people’s view of themselves. A focus on homeless deviance, marginality, or resistance ignores the practices of doing homeless, and seems to exclude the possibility for those practices to be rather ordinary.
The conventional wisdom of Japanese identity is that an individual’s position within the institutions of work and home is the zero-point of entry into Japanese society. Yet, the previous discussion of how homeless people in Ueno Park construct their own identities complicates the presumed un-Japaneseness of the homeless in Tokyo. Whereas marginality has been called the defining condition32 of casual laborers and homeless communities, my research clearly shows that central ideologies are an equally strong influence. Despite the “common sense” that views the margins as a space of cultural exclusion, in these sites, where the identity of individuals is challenged and presumed to be deviant, identities may, in fact, be more intensely rooted in the cultural ideals of the center.
Notes
1. The role of the ie has been the concern of many scholars in their examinations of Japanese identity. In particular see Jane Bachnik and Charles Quinn, Situated Meaning (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1994); Matthews Masayuki Hamabata, Crested Kimono: Power and Love in the Japanese Business Family (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1990); Dorrine Kondo, Crafting Selves: Power, Gender, and Discourses of Identity in a Japanese Workplace (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990); Chie Nakane, Japanese Society (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1970); Nancy Rosenberger, ed., Japanese Sense of Self (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992).
2. For more on how the margins are offensive to official discourses, see Anna Tsing, In the Realm of the Diamond Queen: Marginality in an Out-of-the-Way Place (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1993), 41.
3. Karen Kelsky, Women on the Verge: Japanese Women, Western Dreams (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2001), 28–29.
4. Nojukusha Jinken Shiryoo Sentaa (Resource Center for Homeless Human Rights), Center News, Summer 1998.
5. Patricia Kennett and Masami Iwata, “Precariousness in Everyday Life: Homelessness in Japan,” International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 27, no. 1 (2003): 67.
6. Day labor communities have recently gained attention in the literature and have touched on issues of homelessness, particularly the processes of becoming homeless as it links with the political economy of labor. See Edward Fowler, Sanya Blues (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1996); Tom Gill, Men of Uncertainty: The Social Organization of Day Laborers in Contemporary Japan (Albany: SUNY Press, 2001); Tony Guzewicz, Tokyo’s Homeless: A City in Denial (Huntington, NY: Kroshka Books, 2000); Kazuaki Kasai “Iwayuru ‘hoomuresu’ mondai to wa,” Yoseba 8 (1996): 5–14; Matthew Marr, “Maintaining Autonomy: The Plight of the American Skid Row and Japanese Yoseba,” Journal of Social Distress and the Homeless 6, no. 3 (1997): 229–50.
7. Kim Hopper, Reckoning with Homelessness (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2003), 46.
8. The process of making others of the homeless includes emasculating them.
9. Nojukusha Jinken Shiryoo Sentaa, Center News, Summer 1998.
10. “Osaka Postpones Shelter after Clash with Residents,” Japan Times, November 16, 2000; “Residents Oppose Homeless Plan,” Japan Times, May 11, 1997.
11. Quoted in Guzewicz, Tokyo’s Homeless, 83.
12. Ibid., 91.
13. Gill, Men of Uncertainty; Carolyn Stevens, On the Margins of Japanese Society: Volunteers and the Welfare of the Urban Underclass (London: Routledge, 1997).
14. Gill, Men of Uncertainty, 172.
15. Ibid., 152.
16. Ibid., 162; emphasis mine.
17. E.g., Fowler, Sanya Blues.
18. Oscar Lewis, “The Culture of Poverty,” Scientific American 215, no. 4 (1966): 19–25.
19. James Spradley, You Owe Yourself a Drunk: An Ethnography of Urban Nomads (Boston: Little, Brown, 1970).
20. Philippe Bourgois, In Search of Respect: Selling Crack in El Barrio (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 17.
21. Joanne Passaro, The Unequal Homeless: Men on the Streets, Women in Their Place (New York: Routledge, 1996), 29.
22. For examples of this use of ideas of resistance, see David Wagner, Checkerboard Square: Culture and Resistance in a Homeless Community (Boulder, CO: Westview, 1993); Talmadge Wright, Out of Place: Homeless Mobilizations, Subcities, and Contested Landscapes (New York: SUNY Press, 1997).
23. Homeless women, too, are often constructed as “others” by which to measure the masculine heroics of homeless men on the yama. See Abby Margolis, “Samurai beneath Blue Tarps: Doing Homelessness, Rejecting Marginality, and Preserving Nation in Ueno Park” (PhD diss., University of Pittsburgh, 2002), 134–80.
24. Homeless people I met in Ueno typically said that they “really should not be in the park” (hontoo ni ikenai kedo), and used this phrase to explain to me why they choose to follow park management rules.
25. On a revisit to Ueno Park in the summer of 2003, I learned that this was no longer required. The management had prohibited and permanently removed all the tents from in front of the national museum and was apparently less insistent about the lowering of tents in other parts of the park during operating hours.
26. During a brief trip to Ueno Park in April 2000, I heard that Neko did in fact get into a welfare care program under the guidance of an official from Soogidan (a labor union). Soogidan came to Ueno Park once a week to take anyone who might be eligible to the ward office to apply for welfare.
27. Cf. Takeo Doi, The Anatomy of Dependence, trans. John Bester (Tokyo: Kodansha, 1973).
28. Since Kita was not an ex-laborer, he had a pension that he could start to collect when he turned sixty-five.
29. Scholars have argued that living for the moment, or emphasizing the present rather than past or future, is a common feature in the lives of people of marginalized groups. See Sophie Day, Evthymios Papataxiarchis, and Michael Stewart, eds., Lilies of the Field: Marginal People Who Live for the Moment (Boulder, CO: Westview, 1999).
30. This comment alludes to the complicated relationship between autonomy and obligation. Many homeless people in Ueno Park sang the praises of their autonomous lifestyles; they reveled in the fact that they could “eat, sleep, and drink whenever I want.” Yet many simultaneously claimed that “relationships were the most important thing on the yama.” Homeless people’s use of collective values in support of their autonomy challenges conventional thinking about the group-dependent “Japanese self.” See Margolis, “Samurai,” 105–33.
31. I borrow the term hidden transcript from James Scott, Domination and the Arts of Resistance: Hidden Transcripts (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1990).
32. Gill, Men of Uncertainty.