Over the years, Edward Fowler, an American academic, became a
familiar presence in San'ya, a run-down neighborhood in
northeastern Tokyo. The city's largest day-labor market, notorious
for its population of casual laborers, drunks, gamblers, and
vagrants, has been home for more than half a century to anywhere
from five to fifteen thousand men who cluster in the mornings at a
crossroads called Namidabashi (Bridge of Tears) in hopes of getting
work. The day-labor market, along with gambling and prostitution,
is run by Japan's organized crime syndicates, the yakuza. Working
as a day laborer himself, Fowler kept a diary of his experiences.
He also talked with day laborers and local merchants, union leaders
and bureaucrats, gangsters and missionaries. The resulting oral
histories, juxtaposed with Fowler's narrative and diary entries,
bring to life a community on the margins of contemporary
Japan.Located near a former outcaste neighborhood, on what was once
a public execution ground, San'ya shows a hidden face of Japan and
contradicts the common assumption of economic and social
homogeneity. Fowler argues that differences in ethnicity and class,
normally suppressed in mainstream Japanese society, are conspicuous
in San'ya and similar communities. San'ya's largely middle-aged,
male day-laborer population contains many individuals displaced by
Japan's economic success, including migrants from village
communities, castoffs from restructuring industries, and foreign
workers from Korea and China. The neighborhood and its inhabitants
serve as an economic buffer zone they are the last to feel the
effects of a boom and the first to feel a recession. They come
alive in this book, telling urgent stories that personify such
abstractions as the costs of modernization and the meaning of
physical labor in postindustrial society."
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