The Politics of Survival and Care in Homeless Japan.

Abstract

This study explores the politics of survival and care in postindustrial Japan. It draws on archival and ethnographic data gathered during eighteen months of fieldwork between 2009 to 2014 in Kotobuki district, once the nation’s third largest yoseba (day laborers’ quarter) in Yokohama City. I begin with tracking the formation of Kotobuki as an urban underclass neighborhood and its transformation after mob killings of the homeless in its vicinity in the early 1980s. Central to this process was the reconstruction of urban underclass men as the homeless, i.e., elderly relationless men, whose chances of survival were threatened by their isolation. Framed as a struggle to secure the right to survival vis-à-vis the state, the homeless activism in Kotobuki focused on creating relations that could endure the vagaries of welfare policies, changing compositions of the homeless and their supporters, and the constant threat of unexpected death. This study highlights the temporal structure of daily life (seikatsu) underlying social relations and boundaries in Japan Discussing the incorporation of care relations into the politics of survival. In Kotobuki, a variety of reciprocal exchanges of care as diverse as soup kitchens, AA meetings, and medication regimes became tactics of survival embodying the rhythm of life and the will to live. Meanwhile, the temporal orientation toward social subversion, which had once dominated the district, was reconfigured into circulatory rhythms of survival through narrative events where the homeless and their supporters became attuned to each other’s horizons. For the Kotobuki homeless today, survival involves their incorporation into the circulation of care as both receivers and givers beyond the boundary of life and death. This study provides conceptual tools to enrich the study of the state and social exclusion. While the scholarship on the political economy of welfare tends to prioritize the relationship between the state and individual subjects, this study focuses on how individual subjects are made governable through the socioeconomic pressures on concrete relations of care and how everyday struggles for survival involve tackling the logic of these relations.