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Theory

Squatting Public Space

Japan

Japan's gross national income is second largest after the USA - followed by Germany. These three countries together dominate over half of the wealth of the whole world.

Public Blue

In contrast to the US, Japan is considered to be a homogeneous middle class society. Yet there are approximately 25.000 homeless people in Japan according to official estimations. A third of them live in Osaka alone - which is the second most important metropolis behind Tokyo and third biggest city of Japan. The majority of the homeless lives nomadic, spending their nights under cardboard, in shopping trolleys, or on parking decks. Still others became somewhat settled in their homelessness. Everywhere in the parks and on the banks of the Osaka river one sees blue tents or barracks covered with blue plastic tarps - at times scattered throughout the park area, sometimes lined up in rows, or united to form small communities. The term 'homelessnes' only insufficiently describes the situation of these "No jyuku sha" the 'campers in the rough'. Slums, favellas, barrack villages all these expressions capture the "blue phenomenon" of the Japanese's cities more precisely.

Public space

These blue dwellings shape public space, in Japan they are merely used as a passage between work and family to be hurriedly passed by. Kouen, the Japanese word for park, does not only mean green area, but also stands for public space in a more general sense. Many of those Kouens were created by city planers after Japan's political opening to the west but they were never socially accepted. Traditionally Japanese cities did not have public squares and the concept of the public did not exist. Japanese cities were grouped around the imperial court or military castles. The inner centres of those cities were by far not empty, but rather barricaded. Beyond these closed centres neither open spaces, nor parks, or market places untangled the network of winding roads and multitude of houses. Hawkers established themselves in the Japanese commercial system instead of market places. These comparatively new clearings in the public, however, became the residence areas of the tent inhabitants. Thus these inhabitants of the public are exposed as much to the climatic conditions as they are to social ones. Just as little as the Japanese society has neither traditionally known nor appreciated public space as a public forum likewise are homeless people, who live in those spaces, disrespected. Tent inhabitants are "soto"

Excluded-Included

"Soto" means outside in Japanese, contrary to "uchi", the inside. Both terms refer to the spatial and the social condition of the inner inclusion or outer exclusion. Excluded from the family, outside of the company and outdoors in the public the tent inhabitants are barred from the Japanese society, even though most of them work as day labourers or can collectors. Likewise, Japanese households and interiors are enclosed not only metaphorically but also architecturally: walls, closed windows, shielded inner cord yards and inwardly shifted gardens characterize the common family home. "Ie" means family, household, kinship, inner harmony and affiliation against the outside. The "yakuza"-the Japanese mafia have historically take advantage of the homeless situation. Always a mainstay of the power structure in day-laborer areas, Yakuza have mostly been chased out of the neighborhoods, although they still occupy key positions in negotiating with companies over vacant jobs, offering these jobs to the workless and deducting part of the already low salary.

Strategies of Empowerment

Against the discriminating standards of Japanese society some of the tent inhabitants lead their homeless situation as an alternative form of living. The public character of their existence led to the discovery of the public as a political space and being exposed introduced a new understanding of social relationship. Some of the blue communities have a resistant character, insofar as they try to establish a political and social alternative to the JapaneseÕs standards. Thus they revive a marginalised, mostly suppressed, yet existing history of a political consciousness in Japan. Therefore the so-called Japanese spirit is not only a willingly adaptive and desperately harmonious one. A good natured impulse of compassion by some bourgeois, marking tent inhabitants as victims, overlooks the political and empowering aspect of-at least some of-the public forms of living. In these empowering communities the breathtaking tightness and conformity ruling Japanese family and office structures is replaced by a community of equal individuals, who do not strive to maintain the harmonious status quo, but stand for a modified and improved society. Contrasted to the absolutely prearranged existence of the average Japanese, the public form of living seems to hint at another world. Inevitably, the homeless resist the imminent eviction of their dwellings and the subsequent destruction their alternative way of living.

Eviction of the way of living

The city of Osaka removes tents from parks and dislodges the homeless by means of reclaiming public space. Fences devide parks into allotments and thus make them inaccessible. Only a small wire-meshed path leads through the public green. In that way the kouen-which is the public space locating the public within the urban area-disappears. The remaining tents are fenced in and thus incorporated into the common standards of Japanese accommodation. Where the city evicts tents, it sets up public housing. These official shelters with their place saving conception of storage and their logic of monitoring are by no means an alternative to the individual barrack. The No-jyuku-sha 'campers in the rough' do not worry about their simple housing, but about the independence of their way of living.

Against Deviance

The aesthetics of the cityscape is one of the reasons for the eviction policy. Another one reason is the suppression of alternative ways of living. Where tent inhabitants form communities, alternative living areas develop. The Japanese society of control, however, does not tolerate deviation, although Japan's history is full of examples. Tent colonies are observed, political activists are registered. The police sometimes "visit" those persons at their workplaces who participate in political demonstrations and even foreign visitors are inconspicuously accompanied by security men, when filming blue tents. The experience to be "accompanied" reveals the consequence of living in this harmonized society. Public political involvement is regarded as a transgression, criticism as disloyalty. Consequently most people don't speak about politics in Japan.

by A. Haarmann