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************* The Homeless in Japan Find A Place in Cities' Public Parks Long Economic Slump, Tolerance Allow Shantytowns to Take Root
By PHRED DVORAK Staff Reporter of THE WALL STREET JOURNAL
OSAKA, Japan -- For four months, Osamu Hachiya, an official with the city parks department here, struggled to move 11 homeless people a few hundred feet -- from the southeast corner of Nishinari Park to a more crowded spot near the middle.
First, Mr. Hachiya had to inform the squatters that the city planned to renovate the southeast corner of the public park. Then, he went through five rounds of relocation talks with the homeless in the park's junk-filled main square. The final deal: new space for the 11 near the baseball field, three months for them to move and a pledge to "respect the will of the tent-dwellers." At least, Mr. Hachiya says, he rejected demands for free vinyl sheets and stakes for the new tents. "They're there illegally, after all," says the 54-year-old.
Onto the Streets
Once famous for its equitable society, Japan is now suffering from a homeless problem so bad that shantytowns are filling nearly all the big parks in cities such as Tokyo and Osaka. Part of the problem is the economy: 13 years of slump have pushed up unemployment and bankruptcy rates, driving the poorest onto the streets. The number of homeless people has ballooned to about 25,000, according to a recent government estimate, up from almost none in the late 1980s. Activists say the actual figure is probably several times higher.
That's still tiny compared with the U.S., which has an estimated 600,000 homeless. But while the U.S. federal government spent about $2.2 billion last year on homeless-assistance programs, Japan, until recently, hasn't done much. Three years ago, the nation had no national budget for homeless welfare at all. Even now, the country has just four emergency shelters.
Confronted by mounting numbers of squatters and little guidance on how to handle them, local officials such as Mr. Hachiya are taking matters into their own hands. The result is a mish-mash of Band-Aid measures, rule-bending and tolerance that has helped maintain -- even foster -- orderly shantytowns in public spaces across the nation. Wardens in Tokyo's Shinjuku Chuo Park ask the estimated 130 tent-dwellers to move to another part of the grounds while they trim trees -- then direct them back to their spots when they're done. Osaka Castle Park has a shantytown population of 400, with squatters running their own night-time safety patrols.
Nishinari Park, which Mr. Hachiya oversees, has one of the oldest, most-established shantytowns. It even has its own "chairman": Hisakatsu Fujii, who has lived there for a dozen years. City officials let squatters keep chickens, grow vegetables and light cooking fires at dinnertime. Park caretakers shoo away newcomers, hoping the settlement won't expand, but they don't bother the 90 to 100 squatters who have been there for years. Residents of some shantytowns are forming their own support groups or joining with activists to protect the "homeless lifestyle."
"We are recognized," says Shinjuku Chuo Park resident Hideko Asada, pointing to a homemade mailbox near her cardboard hut where the local mailmen deliver letters. "The country has been turning a blind eye to the problem," says Minoru Yamada, a long-time Osaka labor activist who has set up a 300-strong tent city next to the city hall to protest the government's inaction. "Now, they're paying the price with a vengeance."
Japan's welfare system isn't set up to deal with the growing number of homeless people. Handouts tend to be limited to the sick and elderly, on the theory that able men of working age should hold jobs. (Women and children find it easier to get government aid.) For most of Japan's post-World War II history, that worked: Corporations kept their staff employed for life, and a booming economy provided plenty of work for smaller businesses and day laborers.
Now, that system is crumbling, as once-mighty corporate giants are undergoing massive restructuring, moving factories overseas and shedding thousands of workers. Unemployment reached a record 5.5% recently. Retraining programs are scarce or offer few good job prospects. One homeless shelter, for instance, runs a class in fixing bicycles. As a result, an increasing number of people are falling through the welfare cracks. Three-quarters of the homeless in Osaka are men age 50 to 60 -- too young to collect a pension, but too old to compete for a dwindling pool of jobs in construction and factories. Activists say what's needed is a concerted national overhaul of welfare, labor and housing policy.
Japan is beginning to address the problem. This year, the national budget for homeless-related assistance is $23 million, up from almost nothing in 2000. There are also some local programs, and the national government is coming up with a policy stance, expected within the next few months.
But Japan still has few food-aid programs and there is little coordination among bureaucrats. In Osaka, for example, the parks department is in charge of homeless people in parks, while the construction department oversees those by roads and rivers. But neither can come up with aid programs because that's the responsibility of the welfare department.
The most elaborate shantytowns are in Osaka, the industrial heart of western Japan, where recession and a shrinking market for unskilled labor have put an estimated 10,000 people on the streets. Nishinari Park, tucked in a gritty corner of the city next to a sewage-processing plant, hosts about 100 huts patched together with plywood and blue vinyl sheets. Along the park's main path, a vest-clad resident cuts wood for his stove with a circular saw powered by a portable generator. A few steps away stands a makeshift "barber shop" -- a three-sided vinyl-clad box with a chair inside. The park has a new playground, but for now, no one can use it. Park officials have fenced off the play area with barbed wire, in an attempt to keep yet more homeless from streaming in.
Mr. Fujii, the "chairman" of Nishinari Park's shantytown, says there were few homeless people in Japan when he first set up camp more than a decade ago. Now he has a large, vinyl-draped compound in the center of the park, filled with everything from egg cartons to old handbags to a black-and-white television set run off a car battery.
Mr. Fujii, a 79-year-old former day laborer, gathers newspapers and aluminum cans for recycling, bringing in about $250 in yen a month. That's enough to pay for one solid meal a day and a trip to the public bath every three days. At first, he says, park caretakers tried to push him away, making him move his tent once a month for "cleaning." Eight years ago, they forced him and 70 others out. But with nowhere else to stay, he moved back a month later, and there have been no recent attempts to oust him, he says.
"We don't want to take over the park," he says, with a grimace that exposes his one remaining tooth. "But how else are we to live?"
Osaka officials concede they are uneasy about the growing permanence of shantytowns in public parks. But they say they don't have the budget or national backing for a comprehensive relief program. In 2000, the city came up with a partial solution for its three most-squatter-infested parks: Build sparkling-clean temporary shelters inside the park grounds, and move the homeless indoors -- and out of sight. According to the plan, the homeless can look for jobs, become "self-supporting" and leave, hopefully within three years. The city has spent about $20 million on the program so far.
About a year ago, Osaka put up temporary shelters in Nishinari Park that can sleep as many as 220 people, just a few hundred feet away from Mr. Fujii and his homeless neighbors. It's the job of Mr. Hachiya, the Osaka official, to direct them to the shelter. His mission is pressing, since the city wants to restart a park-renovation project -- stalled for four years because of squatters living on top of the site.
Yet Mr. Hachiya just can't get many people to move in. The shelter remains about two-thirds empty. The city currently frowns upon being too pushy, after activists criticized officials in another park for driving away the homeless. Forcibly removing a tent is a bureaucratic process requiring four different notifications to the owner. So Mr. Hachiya and his team try to persuade park squatters to voluntarily move into the shelters. They're meeting stiff resistance.
In order to enter the shelter, squatters must sign papers promising that even if things don't work out for them, they won't go back to camping in Nishinari Park. But with jobs so few and unstable, residents question whether they can really become self-supporting in three years, as the rules require. At another shelter in Nagai Park, which shut down in March, fewer than 10% of its 200-plus dwellers found jobs and a permanent place to live. Many ended up back on the streets.
"If we leave here there's no guarantee we'll have work," says Akira Kubo, a skinny 55-year-old former construction worker. In his neat shack, he has set up a workshop where he cleans old electrical appliances for resale. He also displays a collection of stone seals that he has carved, traditional Japanese watercolor paintings and lots of books.
Mr. Hachiya concedes the shelter plan is flawed. "There's no exit strategy," he says. "If our positions were switched and I knew I was going to be kicked out in three years, I'd rather stay in the park too."
Though there have been some complaints and even attacks on the homeless, city-dwellers largely tolerate the shantytowns. Japan's homeless settlements tend to be orderly and quiet. Drug problems and violence are rare. Japanese people who wind up homeless "are just like ordinary citizens," says Yohji Morita, a professor who conducted a 1998 survey of homelessness in Osaka.
At the Nishinari shelter, Director Isoji Tanaka bends a few rules. The easy-going former welfare official occasionally doles out medicine when the park squatters get sick, even though the supplies are supposed to be only for people in the shelter. Last November, he put two squatters up for the night when their tents burned down. The two returned to the park the next day. Mr. Tanaka says he is still haunted by the death last year of another one of the park's tent-dwellers. "We said 'hi' every now and then," recalls the 54-year-old Mr. Tanaka, quietly. "It was very sudden."
In the park on a recent day, the square-jawed Mr. Hachiya and a handful of other park officials stood stiffly in blue jackets, preparing for a scheduled, two-hour meeting to discuss moving tent-dwellers out of a proposed renovation area. Mr. Fujii and his neighbors, however, seized the opportunity to lobby for their right to stay put. Among the 50 squatters was a man with a pet rooster tucked into his plaid shirt and an unshaven man in a hooded blue sweatshirt who lives in a cardboard box. They were joined by activists from a group called the Homeless Peoples' Network, which started in 1995 after a homeless man was pushed by youths into a city canal and drowned.
"Do you know why nobody goes to a place like that shelter?" yelled out the man in the blue sweatshirt. "Why don't you tell us?"
"The main reason," Mr. Hachiya ventured gamely, "is that Osaka city has not provided sufficient programs to guarantee that you can become self-supporting after you go in."
There are new programs afoot, he explained, but his voice was drowned out by loud cries of "We've heard all this before." The squatters' demand: A promise to leave their tents alone until the government comes up with a satisfactory welfare program.
Back in his office in a waterfront skyscraper across town, Mr. Hachiya says he doesn't expect to be in this job for too long. Until last year, he handled cultural events for Osaka city, such as puppet shows. In another year, he figures he'll be rotated out into another post. Still, he says he feels the pain of the homeless. "If you were unhappy, you'd take the opportunity to let it out on the officials," he says. "Anyone would."
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Write to Phred Dvorak at mailto:phred.dvorak at wsj.com3
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