An Urban Social Geography of the Homeless in Osaka, Japan (1992)

This article seeks to explain the circumstances of homeless people in Osaka City and their temporal change using the concept of the social space in an urban area. The special concern here is Kamagasaki District, a typical and nationally well-known yoseba (the space served as a catchment place of day laborers for jobs regarded as relatively unskilled). Such places generally have a large number of cheap lodging houses (doyagai) for them. The homeless people in Japan, mostly single man, were called formerly runpen or furosha, and currently are known as nojukusha. They correspond to day laborers in a substantive sense.Kamagasaki is a commonly-used place name of the neighborhood, located in the northeastern part of Nishinari-ward, Osaka City, and its extent is almost identical to that of Airin-chiku (Airin District), as is has usually been referred to by the administrative authorities, police and mass media. There is a huge day labor market centered on Airin Multi-purpose Center in this area and it is generally said that the district has more than twenty thousand day laborers, about two hundred cheap lodging houses and numerous eating houses, resulting in a distinctive landscape segregated from surrounding areas.In the second section, previous research of yoseba is reviewd. This district has been studied as a disorganized area mainly by social pathologists in the existing literature of social science. But it mirrors a negative and passive understanding of this social space in urban area. The author here, putting emphasis on the social structural context, would like to identify a certain social space focused on the district. On this occation the actual situation concerned with the homeless is a very good indicator of the social space.The third section is devoted to a historical explanation. In the period immediately after World War II, Osaka City's governmental measures toward the homeless was to settle disorder due to the influx of sufferers and returnees in and around Osaka Station. Nevertheless, as the district served as the place for single male day laborers during the period of fast economic growth in the 1960s, the homeless within the city tended to be accounted for primarily by Kamagasaki's day-laborers. Then, the measures were developed in the Airin regime (Airin taisei) which was established in the beginning of the 1970's, motivated by the‘riots’and still continues. The survey of occupational careers conducted in 1988 indicates that, the numbers of homeless persons rise occur in the season or months when jobs are unavailable, whereas they become laborers in the remainder.Specific attributes are discussed in the fourth section. According to the records of the Thursday Night Patrol Party within the Kamagasaki Christian Society, there is a general tendency to seasonal size change in incidence of the homeless: they expand from April to summer and then contract. Such change is due to the job offering variation concerned with the labor force through the Nishinari Labor and Welfare Center as well as climatic condition such as temparature. Moreover, the records suggests that this change has been less remarkable within the district, while now obvious outside it. Also worthy-of-note is that, as the number of the homeless as a whole tends to decrease, the inside-the-district proportion has been lower.In the 1988 investigation, the homeless persons are grouped into the following three length types: the long type (more than one year), the short type (less than one year), and the cyclic type, which implies repeatedly homeless and non-homeless conditions seasonally over the past years. Furthermore, such types are cross tabulated with income source and reason for becoming homeless. With regard to the source, many of the long and short types work as junk dealer (yoseya), while most of the other type are day laborers.