PEACE BOAT - Voyage 68



	Life Onboard	LAST UPDATE May 10, 2010
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April 6, 2010

Yuasa Makoto – Understanding Japan’s poverty issue

Most people don’t often associate poverty and homelessness with Tokyo, but Japanese society is beginning to realise it can no longer ignore such issues in their country.

Tokyo is famous for its skyscraper-lined streets and flashing neon lights, symbols of the wealth of the world’s second-biggest economy. What many people don’t associate with Japan’s capital is a city-wide – even country-wide – homelessness and poverty problem. Just steps from the world’s busiest intersection in Shibuya, hundreds of men live in cardboard and plastic shanties. Until recently, the Japanese government and society-at-large turned a blind eye to this issue, preferring to remain ignorant about such issues in their own country.

“People see them and they know that they’re there, but they kind of ignore them,” says Yuasa Makoto, the 41 year-old founder of the Moyai Independent Life Support Center. Since the mid-90s, he’s been working with the homeless and advocating for their rights. The number of people living in the Shibuya park was only 100 in 1995, when he began learning about Tokyo’s hidden poverty problem, but the number steadily increased and by 1999 he counted 600 individuals in the one space. “Back then, I was really surprised that there was something wrong with society,” he says admitting his own naïveté.

Mr Yuasa developed relationships with the people – mostly men – surviving on the streets, visiting them in their makeshift shacks and finding out their stories: He even lived with them one winter. In 1998, the government planned to evict the squatters, so Mr Yuasa joined them in protest. From that experience he learned that survival is only one of the challenges of being homeless.

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Improvised “homes” like this one are somewhat more permanent, but many homeless people in Tokyo carry around cardboard or plastic all day long before setting up shelter along Tokyo’s streets at night.

“People can’t sleep well at night. You wake up every two hours, even if you get used to your homeless living.” There’s constant noise when you’re living in a park and even though you can hear people passing by, you can’t see them through the cardboard or plastic, or see what they’re doing; harassment and violence against Japan’s street dwellers is common. While they’re always at risk of forced removal by the government, random people have been known to set shelters on fire by throwing cigarettes onto the cardboard. There have also been cases of homeless men being beaten to death, stabbed or drowned in rivers (near bridges where they seek refuge).

Others who are able to earn some money live in the city’s internet cafes, paying a fee to stay overnight in a cubicle and use showers; these people are referred to as net-café refugees. “They’re not quite homeless. In the west they would be considered homeless but (not) in Japan, because they have shelter.”

Poverty means more than being poor, he adds. When you’re living in poverty you don’t have the same support networks as everyone else and in Japan that makes it nearly impossible to get an apartment and, in turn, permanent employment. For this reason, Mr Yuasa started the Moyai Independent Life Support Center nine years ago. His non-profit organisation co-signs on houses and apartments in situations where an applicant has no one else to do so. He charges 8000 yen for the service, but in some cases he doesn’t take any money. “At first a lot of people made fun of us for doing so (co-signing for apartments) because they thought homeless people weren’t responsible.” Nobody chooses to be homeless, he insists, adding the attitude that people wind up on the streets because they’re lazy is absolutely false and the fact the Moyai Centre has co-signed on 1500 homes is proof of that.

Yuasa Makoto, onboard from Suva to Yokohama, explained the roots and realities of poverty in Japan. Breaking down stereotypes about homeless people being responsible for their situations has been a major challenge.

Over time Mr Yuasa realised that poverty was the issue he needed to focus on, not just homelessness. In 2004-05, there were more people who lived in an apartment, but couldn’t buy food. “I couldn’t say I was supporting (just) the homeless anymore because there were people with shelter, but living in poverty.”

The year 2006 brought a change in thinking among the general population, says Mr Yuasa, and they began discussing poverty in Japan. Former Prime Minister Koizumi Junichiro ended his time in office and the Japanese people began to reflect upon the state of the nation. At that time, according to the Wall Street Journal, Japan had the fourth highest poverty rate among OECD nations. It was also at this time when the public learned it’s not only the homeless that are victims of poverty. According to the Ministry of Labour, he says, there are 1.6 million working poor in Japan: people who are living on less than two million yen (approx. $21,700 USD) a year.

But there are many cases that are much more extreme, including more than 100 cases a year of people starving to death, all over Japan. In 2007, Mr Yuasa participated in a documentary about the working poor and highlighted the story of a man from Tokyo’s Ikebukuro, living on the equivalent of $2400 a year by collecting magazines. This man was at one point living on $1 a day in a country where the average gross income is 4372 thousand yen (approx. $36,000 USD) “Basically, society is telling him to die,” Mr Yuasa says in the film.

Both the Democratic Party of Japan – currently in power – and the Liberal Democratic Party have stated in campaigns they are concerned for the lives of Japanese citizens, but Mr Yuasa questions the meaning of this. Japan hasn’t increased government spending on child-raising, education or housing, he says, and salary increases don’t significantly benefit those who are earning low incomes.

“When they say lives are important, does that mean the lives of wealthy people or does it mean the lives of the poor?”

With translation assistance by Touma Frank, Fukuda Hikari and Takayama Mariko