San'ya Blues: Laboring Life in Contemporary Tokyo - Hardcover

Fowler, Edward

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0801432472 ISBN 13: 9780801432477

Publisher: Cornell University Press, 1996

Synopsis

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.

About this title

About the Author

Edward Fowler teaches Japanese literature and film at the University of California, Irvine.

From the Back Cover

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 that half 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 Namidabash (Bridge of Tears) in hopes of getting work.

From the Inside Flap

Over the years, Edward Fowler, an American academic, became a familiar presence in San'ya, a run-down neighborhood in northeastern Tokyo. Working as a day laborer himself, Fowler kept a diary of his experiences. The resulting oral histories, juxtaposed with Fowler's narrative and diary entries, bring to life a community on the margins of contemporary Japan.

Reviews

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.
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Edition details

• Publisher: Cornell University Press
• Publication date: 1996
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0801432472
• ISBN 13: 9780801432477
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 288