xxx 2 Posted December 11, 2003 Share Posted December 11, 2003 Seem to be more and more homeless around the train stations, don't you think? What about more outside of the bigger cities - see homeless people in their cardboard houses? Link to post Share on other sites
mogski 0 Posted December 11, 2003 Share Posted December 11, 2003 Would you kindly stop staring and hanging around my home please! You people who use the trains really should learn manners when entering a persons property! Oh and stop stealing my cardboard boxes you damn foriegners!! Link to post Share on other sites
indosnm 0 Posted December 11, 2003 Share Posted December 11, 2003 "There are no homeless in Japan" that was according to a previous prime minister.. Obuchi I think? Link to post Share on other sites
brit-gob 9 Posted December 11, 2003 Share Posted December 11, 2003 Stealing the cardboard boxes!? Anyway, there are more and more of them there folk. On the train line I use all the time, near the tracks under the bridges theres literally hundress of the homeless folk. Link to post Share on other sites
slow 0 Posted December 11, 2003 Share Posted December 11, 2003 The life here must be getting more and more tough for some people. Some of them have very eco-friendly life. They make small shabby house on the riverside and get fish from the river and grow some vegetables there. It doesn't sound so bad, they chose their life style like that. By the way, the magazine helping the homeless(I forgot the name of it) started in Osaka area, do you think it's helpfull? Link to post Share on other sites
Dims 0 Posted December 12, 2003 Share Posted December 12, 2003 Doesn't sound to bad? Looks pretty crap to me. Have you seen the state of some of the rivers near big cities in this country? Link to post Share on other sites
KlingKlang 1 Posted December 12, 2003 Share Posted December 12, 2003 Those cardboard boxes can't be warm... Link to post Share on other sites
bobby12 0 Posted December 12, 2003 Share Posted December 12, 2003 i've got a lot of old clothes i want to throw out. i am thinking of taking them to the train station and giving them to the homeless guys. i have a ton of stuff and its all pretty new (just a little too small or something). do you think they would be insulted? Link to post Share on other sites
mattlucas 0 Posted December 12, 2003 Share Posted December 12, 2003 Yes probably. Maybe just leave it in a corner. If you think Japan (as a developed country) has a homeless problem you should check out some of the cities in North America. At least here they can have there own little blue tarped squatter house. Not having to worry about being assulted or even worse killed. Link to post Share on other sites
Ocean11 0 Posted December 12, 2003 Share Posted December 12, 2003 Plenty of homeless people in Japan get assaulted and killed, sometimes by each other, sometimes by 'lads' looking for kicks... Link to post Share on other sites
mattlucas 0 Posted December 12, 2003 Share Posted December 12, 2003 Okay then. I have been corrected. But sleeping on the streets is probably a lot safer in Japan than in other developed countries cities. Link to post Share on other sites
Davo 1 Posted December 12, 2003 Share Posted December 12, 2003 I have read some pretty horrible stories about violence against the homeless in newspapers here over the years. One that sticks in my mind is schoolboys shooting one man with an airgun repeatedly-the excuse is often that they want to relieve stress. On the positive, authorities seem to have a fairly lax attitude towards the building of ad-hoc housing here. At home you're not allowed to build a little house by the river. They want you in a shelter or something similar. I see some relatively good setups people have made for themselves around Osaka. They've started selling The Big Issue here-I've bought a few copies and hope they're doing well. My experience with homeless people here is generally positive-they certainly don't deserve the mistreatment dished out to them by stressed out schoolboys and other tossers. If you live in Osaka all the Sam&Daves bars are collecting clothing and bedding for homeless people this Xmas. Just give it a wash and drop it off at one of the bars. Link to post Share on other sites
slow 0 Posted December 12, 2003 Share Posted December 12, 2003 "The Big Issue" I found a flyer the other day and asked to a clerk where I can get it. She said it has just started in Osaka area and not coming to Tokyo yet. I think that idea is very good. When I saw the people selling it in london, I didn't know what they were selling but now I know. Link to post Share on other sites
damian 0 Posted December 12, 2003 Share Posted December 12, 2003 is that the green left mag that abusive anticapitalists used to sell outside my office in Sydney? it actually had the odd interesting article. Link to post Share on other sites
sweetaz 0 Posted December 12, 2003 Share Posted December 12, 2003 The treatment of homeless over there sounds horrible. What sort of support does the Japanese government provide for homeless/low income peeps? Link to post Share on other sites
damian 0 Posted December 12, 2003 Share Posted December 12, 2003 I did volunteer work for a few years in a homeless shelter in Sydney. Up close it is just plain ugly. Really bad. These wretched pricks were in the worst state and their histories were just as bad. They were for the most mentally ruined people, either naturally or by alcohol and years of loneliness wondering why their wife was killed in a car crash etc. No shit, there were broken men that tipped over the edge from a typical event that life throws at you. Sure, not nice events, but life events either way. A lot of guys were in and out of prison. Some where professional welfare collectors, yet homeless. The real bad ass ones were the guys that had been banned from the hostel. They camped outside in the ally. Every morning there was some beaten up guy to deal with. There was a murder or three as well. I spent one xmas day there thinking I might give a little and all that crap. Turned out to be the worst mistake. 100% depressing and sad. Also a bad mistake as I had to eat the hostel food, which was really bad. After a year I could walk through city and recognised most of the homeless guys. I even knew some of their names. Most would pretend they didn't see you, or were too nuts to even know what was around them. Some of the guys would be just dying for a conversation. Mixed in with the insanity was moments of cleverness in some of these men. It was always pretty easy to rock up with a pack of smokes and chain smoke for a few hours whilst they talked non stop. More than food or warmth or comfort, all a lot of these people wanted was company. A lot of them wanted alcohol, but you learnt to ignore them if they were after booze. It used to drive me up the wall, getting stuck in half day conversations with these guys. It was really tough going but sometimes ok. One dude would write some really good poetry and songs. Some guys would invent strange religions whilst others would do nothing but swear and stumble around pissed. It was a totally mixed crew, but there was one thing in common: they were 99% lost causes. The really hardcore stinky homeless men were pretty much just in line to die. There is nothing in the future for those types besides more of the same rot every day. The physical condition of these guys was appalling. Seriously, the infections and nasty stuff that happens to a human body when it lives worse than an animal for 5 years is horrific. It is amazing how the hell they managed to stay alive for so long. Here and there they would die and you would stop seeing them around. Some men where potentially able to pull a semi normal life together, but it never lasted for more than a month or so and they would be back. By normal life I do not mean a job etc. That is beyond hope. Just a simple purpose like living in a shared government homelike a normal person and staying sober. The strange thing was that for the most, they kept on reverting back to the street. The pointless self destruction was frustrating. One day was the same as the next, nothing got any better and the flow of nobody homeless men never stopped. In the end I walked away from it. The thing that still gets at me is the endless supply of live trash. It sounds nasty, but on the streets of society, that is all these men were. I reckon half were the same as you or I at some stage in their life. And of that number I guessed that 75% ‘ended up like that’ due to a broken relationship – wife left/had an affair/died. The other theme was broken business/alcohol/gambling. Nearly all of the remaining homeless men where just plain mentally ill, had been for years and had no one to look after them so they ended up on the street. Homelessness sucks, sleeping on a street sucks, being filthy and cold and starving and eating out of a garbage bin sucks. All these things suck. But what really sucks is how these people got there in the first place, their stories really, really suck. Link to post Share on other sites
barok 0 Posted December 12, 2003 Share Posted December 12, 2003 Oh I know what yer sayin'. I tried to volunteer for a shelter once in college, but the funny thing was that the social worker made every effort to dissuade me from helping out. Slow - why is that the general attitude towards homeless people in Japan ? That "it's there choice." Granted, I don't know too much about the situation, but I hear that line an awful lot. Is there free housing available for these people ? Seems odd to me that anyone would choose to live under a blue tarp in a park. Link to post Share on other sites
Siren 0 Posted December 13, 2003 Share Posted December 13, 2003 I think feeling hopeless has a lot to do with it. I still feel sad when I see them in Shinjuku and try to imagine the sad stories behind them. On the other hand, I have seen a TV programme showing a guy trying to help them. At first it was all very encouraging but then you began to see the reasons why these people were trapped in the situation. Link to post Share on other sites
slow 0 Posted April 7, 2004 Share Posted April 7, 2004 Quote: Slow - why is that the general attitude towards homeless people in Japan ? That "it's there choice." I've been thinking about this. Religious reason? We say Jigo-Jitoku.(sounds very cruel but please don't misunderstand me...) This comes from teachings of Buddhism. Anyway, I still think "it's their choice and fate." But I sometimes think what to do if this happen to me too?? Now I buy The Big Issue from a homless guy (I hope he has a place to sleep now...) in Shibuya. Link to post Share on other sites
bobby12 0 Posted April 7, 2004 Share Posted April 7, 2004 Interesting report there dob. For some reason I always thought homeless (back in england) were made up mainly of abused children who ran away from home etc. Link to post Share on other sites
Raury 0 Posted April 7, 2004 Share Posted April 7, 2004 Good to hear that The Big Issue is in Japan. I bought it when I was in the UK, and do so, now it is in Adelaide. Do the vendors a favour and buy a copy. You may find that the content is pretty good, and worth whetever the cost is. Link to post Share on other sites
bobby12 0 Posted April 8, 2004 Share Posted April 8, 2004 interesting article by the BBC here Link to post Share on other sites
indosnm 0 Posted April 8, 2004 Share Posted April 8, 2004 In Nagoya we have nice parks in the center of the city which is filled with tents. Which in the end keeps people away from actually going to and enjoying what the park was made for. With Aichi hosting the 2005 expo, one would think that they would get rid of these tent citys. They have started making bars & clubs close earlier to make the city "safer" ( which most visitors won't even have contact with) but still leave the tents which are there for every visitor to see???? Link to post Share on other sites
Ocean11 0 Posted April 8, 2004 Share Posted April 8, 2004 Well if the world cup in Osaka was anything to go by, there will be some heavy-handed tidying up in the parks a bit nearer the time. Link to post Share on other sites
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