Homelessness and Liberty

The night at Capsule Hotel Namba had made me feel very out-of-this world. Everyone I have spoken to about Osaka finds it to be a big city. I found this too. They do not however, think of it as alien. Which I did. I felt so foreign and disassociated the next morning, as I headed back into the train intestines, I might as well have been in space.

I got off at a station that, according to my Lonely Planet, was stone's throw from Liberty Osaka Human Rights Museum. When you are in a train you could be anywhere in the country (squint a bit and you could be anywhere in the world). Outside this particular station though, I felt nowhere in Japan. Not anywhere I had been or seen before. It was dirty. The chicken wire flanking the tracks was hung with debris and a powdery brown with years of pollution and neglect. The museum, which should have been looming in front of me was nowhere to be seen so I decided to penetrate the area for a few blocks and see what was what. Everywhere on the street were little shabby stalls made of blue plastic sheeting. Some of the stalls had plastic on the ground in front of them too on which were assorted items which, I guessed, were for sale. Old video tapes, broken shoes, small grubby plastic purses. Stall after stall of worthless tsatkes. It looked like a street-long garage sale that was selling stuff that came from a home too poor to have a garage. Ten minutes walk into the area and I found street after street to be the same. Concrete buildings that wept black goo from their cornices and in front of them the blue stalls. For miles and miles in every direction. There were also more dogs than I had yet seen in this country and they were not the precious, groomed little handbag dogs that belong to fancy women in sunglasses. They were big and baleful township braks. Some were roaming slowly through the clutter of stalls and some were shut up in chicken wire cages between the buildings. Some sat at the feet of men who wore overalls of pistachio green I recognised as construction wear. The men, like the dogs were baleful, slow, innumerable and indiscernible from one another. They sat and smoked or crossed the streets without apparent purpose. This was not the first time I had seen this many people on the streets of a Japanese city but it was certainly the first time I had seen so many people without a destination. They were clearly not going anywhere. They were nowhere.

I have become used to being stared at here. It is impossible to slip under the radar because I cannot 'be Japanese' in appearance, however much I try to be in behaviour. In this derelict neighbourhood I was more conspicuous than I have ever been; wearing my white coat (which is inexplicably still bright white - it must be magic) and I literally shone , reflecting light and otherness against the grot. I found a way out of the maze of shacks - I had given up pretending they were commerce ventures of sorts and accepted them as what they were - the first informal housing I had found in the country and these sad, sad men my first homeless in Japan. Toothless, dirty. Smelly. A taxi found me on a main street lined with petrol stations and whisked me off to Liberty Osaka; which wasn't that far away distance wise, but that it had trees and playgrounds and public amenities like post offices around it, made it a world away. In the taxi I tried to work out why I had felt so threatened. I was from South Africa man. I can do homeless, I can do poverty. I'm not a naive first-world baby who cries when she sees a dog...or a man...foraging through garbage. Has four months in Japan made me soft? Yeah, so the men had stared at me. But by now, I should be used to that - everyone here stares. No one had approached me or tried to mug me or anything. They had done nothing but stare, so why was I so freaked?

The Museum is manned by volunteers - little old men and littler ladies in nylon waistcoats. They were very kind to me. They gave me a walk about headset that provided English commentary and they tag-teamed me so that I was never alone in the otherwise deserted rooms. The exhibits are divided into twelve sections. Twelve sectors of Japanese society that have had their rights infringed upon and, in some cases, that continue to be marginalised. The Ainu, Okinawan first peoples, Koreans in Japan, Gays and Lesbians, people with AIDS, women, the disabled, victims of pollution and Minamata disease, Hansen's disease survivors, Buraku and the homeless. In past posts I have written effusively about Japan's advanced-ness, the nation's progressive practices with regards to the aged and the sick. I have seen the monuments to war and peace in Hiroshima. I suppose that any country and its policies turn out to be putrid if you scratch the surface. Seeing these twelve exhibits completely shattered my idea of Japan as a land of boundless compassion. I found out about Eugenics, extreme racism and modern high-tech discrimination based on ancient feudal kak. I learned about people crippled by hazardous chemical fuck-outs or wars who the government then ignore or worse, ship off to die somewhere with no infrastructure where no one will see or smell them.

The lowlight of the whole experience was the section on homelessness in Japan, Osaka in particular. The area in which I had got lost an hour or so before, it turns out, is called Kamagasaki. It has for generations been the place where day labourers gather and get work. Working a day in construction or on the docks gets you a stamp in a little passport type book. That stamp is then presented at a government office and you get a small wage. With these wages men would be able to pay a day's rent in a hostel - all those grubby grey buildings that weep muck from the windows. Problem is, with Japan's ageing populous, thousands of day labourers are now too old to labour. If they don't work they don't get money and if they don't get money they cant pay a night's rent. So instead of living in the buildings they now live outside them, in the blue plastic shacks. The scores of men I saw doing nothing were waiting for work that day or maybe, at ten a.m they were already waiting till the next day. Apparently there are 30,000 day labourers in Kamagasaki nearly all men and nearly all over 50. What I had seen now made such horrible sense. I thought again about why I had been so frightened there. Maybe it was fear mixed with embarrassment - it's bad enough being a tourist anywhere but to be so obvious a tourist around people who maybe didn't want to be looked at?