Japanese Portraits: Pictures of Different People (24 page)

The youngish man with whom I was talking turned to glance at me. He was a workman, a
tobishoku
, one of those who build tall buildings, walk the high beams in their two-toed rubber
tabi.

The glance was amused.
Yoku shitte oru da na
, he said: A lot you know about it.

- But these people are dropouts.

- Oh, is that so? he replied, leaning back and crossing his arms over the expanse of bare chest above his woolen bellyband. He seemed to be thinking how best to solve the problem I apparently represented.

- Look, he said finally: There's still work at proper companies, but not at small ones, the kind that use job-brokers. If you want to learn something about it you ought to get out of bed at four in the morning and go watch them lining up for work, hoping they'll be hired for the day—five hundred men lined up for fifty jobs.

He told me you had to look fairly strong, like you could do a day's work, but the trouble was that after a person had been out of a job for a week or two he didn't look too good. So he didn't get picked by the brokers.

And after a month or two of that there wasn't much hope of finding any work at all. That was when you started poking around in garbage cans and drinking anything you could lay your hands on. You didn't wash, your hair got long, your teeth went bad. You stopped caring, you see.

So a person could be a real bum in half a year. But he hadn't dropped out, understand? He hadn't chosen to be a
furosha.
Understand?

I sat, surprised, chastened. One is rarely spoken to this directly and the message is seldom this straight. But then we were not sitting in the polite uptown—we were in the everyday downtown, seated on a bench in Sumida Park, watching the river flow by in the late afternoon of a day in early summer.

After a time he broke the silence by pointing out a bus going over Kototoi Bridge.

- I came to Tokyo on a school trip when I was about fifteen, and we all hung out of the windows looking at this and that. And we went right over that bridge there. I must have looked at this very park. I might have seen this very bench.

He smiled, looked down at his
tabi:
And I sure didn't think I'd be sitting here like this.

- Like this?

- With none of that work that everyone's got so much of if he really wants it. You think otherwise I'd be sitting here in the daytime?

- You're out of a job, then?

- For two days now.

He was from Kyushu, had done a few years in the Self-Defense Forces (which is what Japan calls its postwar army), then taken his separation pay and bought a truck. He and a friend were going into business ... and, well, he lost the truck—some unexplained misfortune—and began doing highrise construction work.

- But they went and filled up Tokyo. Land is too expensive to build on now unless you're a really big company. But all the big construction companies, they got their own workers now, pay them by the month.

- Then where do you sleep?

- Up to yesterday, a bunkhouse in Sanya.

I knew about Sanya. It was Tokyo's slum, filled with flophouses and often complained about in the papers.
Furosha
sprawled in the streets, drunk or sick or both. Sanya was where the brokers came early some mornings with orders for ten head here and five head there. Newspaper editorials spoke of the area as a blight on the capital.

- And last night it was
aokan—
out in the open, right here in the park. But not tonight. No, tonight I'll be far away.

- Why? Have you found work?

He smiled: No such luck. And you better not be here either, he added.

This was because the police were going to make one of their periodic patrols, here in our park as well as in Asakusa and Ueno. Any vagrants they found would be rounded up and put into vans, then carted off to hospitals. It was for their own good.

I had heard about these, about the welfare centers and the free hospitals for the homeless. One of the official answers to the
furosha
problem was that, with these facilities, there was no problem.

- No problem for them, observed the
tobishoku
: But you just try to stay in one of them. You can get in for a night or two, if you're lucky. Then you're kicked out again for a week or so. There are just too many want in. There's no more room.

- Of course, if you really want a place to stay, permanent, then when they try to shove you into the van you get violent and fight back. That means that you're disturbed and so they pack you off to one of the crazy houses up north. And then you've got a home for good. Just try to get
out
of one of those places.

Smile long gone, he went on to say: You see, if they get rid of everyone, then Sanya will be empty, so they can finally tear it down and build shopping centers or something. And, of course, that would stop the Sanya
senso
too.

I knew something about this as well, the Sanya war, so long-continued now that the papers have stopped reporting about it. This is the endless battle between the gangs and unions.

The gangsters also act as job-brokers. When they find work for a man they then take part of his wage. The labor unions want to remedy this practice, which results in such low pay for the workers. They want job allocation to be fair and they want the worker to have a full day's pay in his pocket. They also hope to organize the men into a real union, able to dictate prices to the bosses. This conflict of interests has led to much violence and a number of killings—most famously a film director making a documentary on the subject. But, I had also heard, the police now had it well under control.

- The police? He laughed: They stand around and watch. They don't want to get involved. Maybe they have orders not to, for all I know.

This, he explained, was because of the landowners, the local merchants, all those who had an interest in cleaning up Sanya; hence, the local politicians as well. They called it a disgrace to have a place like Sanya in this city. What they meant—besides the shame of having people freezing on the streets—was the shame of seeing all that land not being used profitably.

I turned and looked at him more closely. An articulate, dissident laborer is rare.

- And how, I asked, do you know all this? How do you know about the patrol tonight? Surely the cops must keep things like that secret?

- Maybe they tried to. But we were told about it over the loudspeaker when I went to look for work this morning. The truckers announced it just before they drove off. They don't want Sanya destroyed. Good cheap labor like us. Lots of us to choose from.

Then he smiled: Me—I'm off to Yokohama once it gets dark.

- You ought to keep right on going, all the way back to Kyushu.

He nodded: You're right. But when I do, I want to do it properly. I want to go back with a present for my mother, and something for my little nephews. I don't want to just slink back.

- If you wait too long you won't be able to get back at all.

- Yes, he said, nodding again and then, apparently quoting: Fall once into Sanya and there's no climbing out.

Some schoolboys passed, laughing and shouting in the last sunlight.

- That was the best age, wasn't it? I remember that age. I wish I was back there again, he said.

We were silent for a while. I then suggested a meal, though he hadn't asked for one. So we ate chicken pilaf at a local place where the proprietress was visibly disturbed that a common workman with a bare chest should be there, and with a suspicious foreigner at that. She would have been even more upset had she overheard our conversation.

He was telling me about this notorious hospital all the vagrants fought against being sent to. And this wasn't only because of its high mortality rate. It was also apparently because the place was well known for supplying organs to other hospitals: fresh kidneys, eyeballs, hearts—anything you wanted.

This I disbelieved: Come on. That would make too big a stink in the press.

- Well, maybe—if they found out. But, look, people don't care.

We ate in silence for a time, while I picked out the bits of chicken skin and gristle I found. Then with a quick bow he thanked me and said: There, that'll last me till tomorrow morning and I'll be down in Yokohama at the docks. I hear the brokers down there aren't gangsters, at least not all of them.

During the following days as I made my way around Tokyo I found myself looking at the
furosha
on the streets or in the subway passages, and not only downtown but in Ginza, in Shinjuku as well.

On some days there were lots of them, on others none at all. I supposed that the police were moving them out. Certainly attempts were being made to keep them away. I noticed pools of water standing in a corner where the day before several men had been lying down. And wet sand along the corridors where they had sat, to make rest impossible.

Then one night in Ueno, going home, walking along a subway corridor, I saw several of them camped among the colonnades. Some were reading their newspapers, a few were lying down, curled up. But one, drunk or delirious, clothes torn and muddy, was standing by a pillar, pissing.

And coming toward him in their green uniforms were two security guards. The younger saw the old man urinating and rushed forward. Shouting
Hora, kono yaro—
Hey, you stupid bastard—he struck him hard across the back of the head.

The old man, unsteady anyway, fell, sliding in his own piss across the paving.
Kono yaromé,
shouted the young guard, with the other looking on, and kicked the old man's backside as he was trying to get up.

The older guard took his arm to help him, then apparently thought better of it and released the piss-wet coat, and the two of them began cuffing the
furosha
down the corridor.

And I, watching his wet, retreating back, thought of the good-natured, country-faced young worker from Kyushu. Was this what he'd become in a few years? But I would never know. I never expected to see him again.

But I did—in Asakusa. He was striding along in his wide wing trousers and two-toed
tabi
, carrying a small bag and looking as though he was going somewhere.

- Yo, he said when he saw me, his smile wide: They didn't pick you up in the park!

- I didn't go. I stayed home.

- Well, you're not the only one with a home now. I got this job. I leave tomorrow morning. Osaka. Good pay. I'll work there for a month and then have enough to get back to Kyushu. I'm going to ride the bullet train. With presents and everything. Here, look.

And he showed me his contract, a precious piece of paper which presumably spelled everything out. I could read none of it except his name—the characters for "forest" and "river."

- Hey, you can read. Yes, Morikawa. What about the given name? No? It's Toshio. Not Toshiro, Toshio.

I congratulated him and then asked how he had happened to get the job. It was pure luck, he said. Some broker he'd never seen before. Said he needed five men but that they'd have to leave Tokyo. Everybody was ready for that, you bet, but there were fifty-some to choose from.

- So what did he do?

Well, the broker had apparently resorted to a
takara
, a lottery, to decide. And Toshio here smiled broadly, remembering: I got lucky.

It seemed that these fifty hopeless adults had stood around and engaged in a primitive elimination game—stone-paper-scissors. This was the
takara
, and the five survivors got the jobs, got the chance to leave Sanya.

Over a
nabé
stew we talked on and on about the bright future and, when that finally ran out, about the dark past. I told him with some indignation what I had witnessed in the Ueno subway passage.

- Well, what do you expect? was his unexpected answer: You can't have these old folks lying around and pissing where people are walking.

- But they were brutal, those two.

- Probably the only way to get him to move. He was probably bombed out of his mind anyway.

- Or maybe just out of his mind, I said indignantly.

- Maybe.

Toshio was no longer interested in the fate of the
furosha
now that he was no longer in danger of becoming one. And he was no longer interested in the future of Sanya now that he was no longer condemned to live in it. Instead he wanted to talk about what lay in store for him.

- I've been to Osaka just once, he said: Nice place.

- They have a slum there that's bigger even than Sanya. You watch out.

He laughed, showing his strong teeth, as white as the clean T-shirt he was wearing. Gone was that expanse of tanned skin above the belly-band. Instead, emblazoned on his chest was a picture of the lord of the jungle, with
Lion
under it.