Cardboard “housing,” Tokyo, late 1990s
I lived in Japan during the boom times and left before the bust. And bust it did. The photos here paint a depressing picture of just how bad times became for some Japanese in the 1990s. Recession brought with it a seismic realignment in the relationship between workers and employers. College recruitment slowed to a trickle, women were discouraged from entering the workforce, and lifetime employment began to be phased out. Suddenly millions of Japanese became “arubaito” — part-timers.
Tokyo is not a city in which one wants to be without a steady income. At the recession’s inception, the city remained the most expensive in the world, and before long blue- and white-collar workers alike found themselves struggling to pay their bills. The most unfortunate of these, primarily day laborers, a.k.a. construction workers, lost their jobs and then their homes. Increasingly, Japanese commuters began encountering these unfortunate souls in their subway stations. One of the largest of these stations, Shinjuku, became home to several hundred of the newly dispossessed living in cardboard boxes. These elaborately painted boxes and the suspicious fire that eventually destroyed them — killing four — are documented at the links below.
I read about the Shinjuku box-dwellers from time to time throughout the 1990s, but I remained unaware of their fate until stumbling across the story on Pink Tentacle recently. Coincidentally, I now live close to a city that’s engaged in its own initiative to roust the homeless from public spaces. Housing costs in northern California are on a par with those of Tokyo ten years ago, and safety nets are no more adequate.
There’s no one solution to homelessness. Good people inside and out of government continue to look for answers. Our media tell us that Americans don’t want or can’t afford a safety net on the scale of what northern Europeans offer. Some still revel in the image of Americans pulling themselves up by the bootstraps, assuming that everyone has boots to begin with, and no demons or addictions to overcome.
You can find more photos of Shinjuku Station’s cardboard house paintings here and here.
An explanation of the effort to paint and photograph the structures is available on artist Take Junichiro’s website. Excerpt: “A group of painters painted them. Leading the group was Take Junichiro, who is also the person who made this website. Once during the painting process Take was arrested and forced to spend 22 days in jail. The painting continued even after his arrest, but finally came to an end when the underground kingdom was destroyed in a huge fire. After the fire, the authorities started reconstruction on the tunnels so that the homeless could never occupy them again. They succeeded in kicking the homeless out of the west exit underground. This website was made to call attention to the paintings on the cardboard houses… The photographs here are the work of photographer Sakokawa Naoko and others who sympathized with what we were doing.”
More on the homeless in Tokyo is available here, in an article from the period of the cardboard house paintings. The fire and its aftermath were the subjects of this article in The Japan Times.
