The old man under the bridge

Once a week, I go visit a client in Tochomae, which is located next to the bustling neon of Shinjuku. After following a long, impressionless underground walkway to exit A5, I emerge into the greenery of a small park. I turn left, and walk under a footbridge, and hat's where I see him.

He's maybe 50 years old, short and haggard. There's a kid of concrete shelf just under one of the bridge supports, which he has converted into a kind of open plan home, but without the walls or roof (well, the bridge is the roof in that it keeps the rain of him). There's a sprawl of "stuff" that he must have collected over the course of years, such as a gore-tex sleeping bag, warm blankets, half a dozen plastic umbrellas, a cooking stove, some dirty looking pots for cooking, a neatly stacked collection of manga (which a lot of homeless people re-sell after being discarded by salarymen), a fairly new radio which is turned down low but seems to be always on, as well as every other material object that a person needs to survive living under a bridge.

Sometimes, if it's cold like today, he'll be sleeping in his arctic sleeping bag, which he has zipped over his head, and piled about five blankets on top. All of his possessions are seemingly scattered around him in disarray, although maybe there is some chaotic order to them which I'm not picking up on. I've seen a policeman walk straight past him without even glancing at him, and this is the same reaction of everybody else who walks under that bridge. It's like he's invisible, or at least if people keep looking straight ahead and ignore him, then there's no need to think about it. It being the rising problem of urban homelessness which has been steadily increasing since Japan's bubble economy meltdown of the early 90s.

In turn, the homeless keep themselves to themselves. They set up little communities in parks, using blue tarpaulin and cardboard to construct a new subdivision in urban living. Depending on how long they have lived in one particular location, their homes can be very sophisticated "buildings", with entrance for taking off your shoes, with a kitchen, living room and bedroom (I kid you not). Some have even been able to find local electric power outlets, so that they have televisions and microwave ovens. The parks are popular because it gives easy access to toilets and washing facilities.

Occasionally, you'll see a news report about police trying to "evict" whole tarp villages, as happened a couple of years ago in Osaka. In that particular case, the homeless took the case to court, and the judge ruled that in fact the police were in the wrong. The tarp constructs could be viewed as homes, taking into account how long the people occupying them had been living there, so they could stay and continue living there. I'm not too sure of the technicalities, but in effect that was what was decided.

This all seems very different from the behaviour and attitude to the homeless in London. Here, the homeless don't beg. Instead, they scavenge and set up make shift stalls selling manga in Shibuya. They walk around with big resin sacks filled with crushed cans which they can take to the government recycling depot, and get some cash. They form communities in parks around the city, so that the blue tarp of their homes blend in seamlessly with the everyday of living in this contradictory city.

More baby photos

On a happier and more personal note, we went along to the Red Cross hospital last week and got some new pics of the baby. She/he's now 4cm long and 11 weeks old, and everything seems to be in good working order.

A very belated happy New Year and a mystery solved

Well, it's been a while - 23 days to be exact, which in cyberspace is a lifetime! Not to fret, for I am back (no, I doubt if you are actually fretting, but just humour me).
So, to begin this first entry in the year of the wild boar let's clear up a riddle. do you remember my entry of the 17th December? It was about the gruesome discovery of a headless, limbless body in Shinjuku, packed into a plastic garbage bag. Well, the initial speculation was that it was some sort of yakuza gang killing, and when the head to the body was found a few weeks later in another location this seemed to back that theory up. However, it turned out that this very dead person was reported missing by his wife shortly before Christmas. She had said that he had been out drinking with work colleagues, and had never returned home. However, one of his work colleagues, upon hearing this did some checking up, and asked the apartment building security of the couple to confirm his colleague had not returned that fateful night, and they said he had (there was CCTV evidence). He reported this to the police, who promptly arrested the wife, who then immediately admitted to killing her husband.
Now, this wasn't just some ordinary murder. There was a press release with more details. The woman, who claimed her husband had been beating her, koshed the husband over the head with a wine bottle as he was sleeping. This killed him, and instead of reporting it to the police, she went out the next day and purchased a saw, a knife and some large garbage bags. Then she cut him up, with the plan to make it look as if it was some sort of gangster killing, and then distributed the various body parts around Tokyo.
I mean, blimey! Talk about strange. Even stranger is the fact that almost at the exact same time there was another similar murder, where a 21 year old man killed his sister by first hitting her on the head, then strangling her, drowning her and finally chopping her up into ten pieces. He then went to an intensive cramming course to help him get into dental school, telling his father that if he smelt something funny from his room it was some shark meat he'd bought. Of course, the smell got pretty unbearable, and when it was checked, his parents found their dead daughter.
In both cases the families were rich and seemingly successful, and outwardly happy. Internally, there was the alleged physical abuse in the first case, and in the second, the brother said his sister, who he hadn't spoken to for two years (even though they lived together), had said that he would never be able to enter dental school (because he had been trying for two years and had been failing).
Something is terribly wrong in this society for such things to happen, especially because the perception is that Japan is such a peaceful, community driven country.