Yokohama Street Life: The Precarious Career of a Japanese Day Laborer (AsiaWorld) - Hardcover

Gill Meiji Gakuin University, Tom

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1498511988 ISBN 13: 9781498511988

Publisher: Lexington Books, 2015

Synopsis

Yokohama Street Life: The Precarious Career of a Japanese Day Laborer is a one-man ethnography, tracing the career of a single Japanese day laborer called Kimitsu, from his wartime childhood in the southern island of Kyushu through a brief military career to a lifetime spent working on the docks and construction sites of Tokyo, Osaka and Yokohama. Kimitsu emerges as a unique voice from the Japanese ghetto, a self-educated philosopher whose thoughts on life in the slums, on post-war Japanese society and on more abstract intellectual concerns are conveyed in a series of conversations with British anthropologist Tom Gill, whose friendship with Kimitsu spans more than two decades. For Kimitsu, as for many of his fellow day laborers at the bottom of Japanese society, offers none of the comforting distractions of marriage, family life, or a long-term career in a settled workplace. It leads him through existential philosophy towards Buddhist mysticism as he fills the time between days of hard manual labor with visits to second-hand bookshops in search of enlightenment.

The book also portrays Kimitsu’s living environment, a Yokohama slum district called Kotobuki. Kotobuki is a ‘doya-gai’—a slum inhabited mainly by men, somewhat similar to the skid row districts that used to be common in American cities. Traditionally these men have earned a basic living by working as day laborers, but the decline in employment opportunities has forced many of them into welfare dependence or homelessness. Kimitsu’s life and thought are framed by an account of the changing way of life in Kotobuki, a place that has gradually been transformed from a casual laboring market to a large, shambolical welfare center. In Kotobuki the national Japanese issues of an aging workforce and economic decline set in much earlier than elsewhere, leading to a dramatic illustration of the challenges facing the Japanese welfare state.

About this title

About the Author

Tom Gill is professor of social anthropology at the Faculty of International Studies of Meiji Gakuin University, Yokohama.

Review

[T]he book is unconventional and defies easy categorization; it is a book about one person, set within a shifting landscape of labor relations in Japan. It is not exactly a case study and has an objective that is both modest and grand—to see in the life history of Nishikawa a ‘great big library’.... [W]here I found myself most pulled in—and how I think this book will be most useful for scholars of Japan and informal/precarious labor—is when reading Kimitsu’s life story against the backdrop of the changing ecology of Kotobuki, which Gill is quite deft in laying out.... As I see it, what both Gill—and Nishikawa—have to say about this is one of the main contributions of YokohamaStreet Life.... Geared to political economy in its emphasis on day-labor and welfare, and to the life-story mode of ethnography, the book is straightforward in being what it announces itself to be: the story of the life of Nishikawa Kimitsu told as ‘the precarious career of a Japanese day laborer’. (Social Science Japan Journal)

Gill's appreciation of, indeed affection for, Kimitsu comes across in almost every page.... [The text] retains the distinctiveness, and messiness, of a life on the margins, rendered through one of the more remarkable characters in memory. (The Journal of Japanese Studies)

This book is reminiscent of Maxim Gorky’s 1902 novel The Lower Depths, about a group of down-and-outs on the banks of the Volga, and of the 1956 film On the Bowery, about the New York skid row. It may surprise readers to find that prosperous Japanese cities also have such places, and even more so that they are home to men of learning. One such was Kimitsu, the subject of this book, whom I was privileged to meet on a visit with Tom Gill to the Yokohama ‘skid row’ in September 1994. In the course of that meeting Kimitsu grilled me on the 1938 Munich agreement, the 1956 Suez crisis, the music of Bartok and post-war European politics: a truly extraordinary character, wonderfully described in this book. (Arthur Stockwin, University of Oxford)

Tom Gill’s evocative descriptions give detail and depth to our often over-generalized view of the Japanese underclass. This book challenges our understanding about the lived experiences of individuals living in low-income areas, and privileges their views about their lives and on wider Japanese society and history. Kimitsu’s story vividly captures the atmosphere of the yoseba, which is one of isolation and connection, humor and sadness, and vital humanity. (Carolyn S. Stevens, Monash University)

Through his perseverance and good nature, Gill has succeeded in bringing to the surface the hidden potential and elegance of a stevedore’s thoughts and imagination that otherwise would have been forgotten or wasted. The conversations between the university scholar and the proletarian thinker have yielded a rich, and engaging book. Kimitsu's narratives provide not only raw and penetrating insights into the world of day laborers in Japan, but most importantly enlighten the reader about hidden aspects of Japanese culture and society. This book is a journey and discovery. (Rey Ventura, author of Underground in Japan)

This book is a one-man ethnography that seeks to understand life at the bottom of Japanese society through the personality of day laborer and street-philosopher Kimitsu Nishikawa. Through interviews with Kimitsu, Tom Gill analyzes life in the Yokohama slum district of Kotobuki—a district in which welfare has come to replace labor as the defining element of daily life.

About this edition

• Publisher: Lexington Books
• Publication date: 2015
• ISBN 10: 1498511988
• ISBN 13: 9781498511988
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 162