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(スエーデンの大学院で学んでいた時分に、学内のポータルにアップしていたものを引っ越しています)
Ueno in Tokyo is an area with culture. There are many art museums, National Museum, National Museum of Nature and Science, and University of the Arts (the best one in Japan) in the woods of Ueno Park. At the same time, it is famous for the number of homeless people living there.
Shigeru Kazaki had no job at the time of 2000, the period he encountered homeless people in Ueno Park. He used to work as a consultant in the field of ODA and spent many years in South America, where he told he is more familiar with than with Japan. With his unemployment compensation and with plenty of time at home, he beagn to go to Ueno Part with his 3-year old son, just to play with him and leave home so that his wife could take more care of their 6-month daughter.
There he came to get acquainted with homeless people, telling that he might become their neighbor in the near future.
Ueno is a place where there was a war at the time of Meiji Restoration in mid/late-19th century. The civil was fought between those who supported the declining Shogun of Edo Bakufu and those of an emerging government who tried to change Japan into a modern nation. Even though Edo Bukfu surrendered and opened Edo Castle, more than a thousand Samurai (Bushi) who could not accept the surrender formed a party called Shogi-tai and moved to Ueno Park. Equipped with modern cannons and guns, the emerging government wiped out Shogi-tai in one day. (the book explain a little about this history)
Kazaki compares the homeless people to Shoji-tai samurais. Originally those homeless people came to Tokyo with the national economy demands, especially in the time of rapid economic growth in 1960's. Now with globalization and accompanying shifts in skills the new economy needs, those people became obsolete and were abandoned in the Ueno Park.
During his one -year commute to Ueno park, Kazaki developed his own connections with people living there. As a former ODA consultant, he found ODA approach to help local economies in South America could be applied to helping homeless in Japan. He fostered an idea of establishing a company by homeless people whose skills were very diverse. Actually homeless people he encountered included a lot of intellectual people, such as those with practical skills in computer programming or forestation, or with deep knowledge of anthropology. He observed they ended up with living there just by chance, which can happen to anyone (and increasingly true in 2009-2010)
He lamented Japanese government did very little to help them while spending a lot of aid money for foreign countries in the form of ODA ( I personally know ODA money goes through a lot of institutions which Japanese bureaucrats have a lot of interests)
He also described churches that served food to homeless people (though homeless had to listen to preaches for more than one hour before they got hot meals) were often run by Koreans, and Japanese Buddhists and Christians were not visible.
Together his experience of getting involved in collective disputes between homeless and bureaucrats and interviews with church leaders and bureaucrats , this book is very valuable real-life description of homeless, their supporters, and bureaucrats associating Ueno Park in early 2000.