San'ya Blues: Laboring Life in Contemporary Tokyo

Anyone who believes that Japanese society is a homogenous, well-oiled machine--a stereotype often sounded in American media--would do well to read this gritty, firsthand account of life for day-laborers in Tokyo's shunned ghetto district, San'ya. Fowler, who teaches Japanese literature and film at UC-Irvine, visited San'ya repeatedly between 1989 and 1991 and lived and worked there for six weeks in the summer of 1991. His descriptive powers and cultural understanding offer a vivid context for the oral accounts of San'ya inhabitants describing their personal histories and daily lives. For the roughly 7500 day-laborers living in San'ya (many of ethnically mixed origins, like Chinese or Filipino), the district is as much a ""state of mind"" as a slum. Without banks or educational facilities above the grammar-school level, but replete with bars and pachinko parlors, San'ya is a deadend--or as one resident put it, ""the bitter end""--that offers little hope for improving one's lot. And, as Fowler learned during his carefully described six-week stint as a day-laborer, dutifully rising at 4:30 a.m. does not guarantee a job. Though local labor unions sponsor four annual festivals that consist of several days of drinking, singing and dancing, even the New Year's festival is called the ""Year Forgetting Party"" rather than a celebration of the one to come. Overall, this is a vivid, if depressing, account of an urban Japanese underclass that bears a surprising resemblance to America's own inner-city population. (Oct.)