Searching for Homeless People in Japan

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[Adventures in Faith: Japan; the late 1980s] After I met that homeless man under the bridge, Tom and I wondered if there were other homeless people in Japan. We set out to find them.

 


 

Meeting that homeless man at the highway overpass was an epiphany. It was life-changing.

I took it to prayer. I thought about it for days.

To this day, I have never resolved whether he was a homeless man, or an Angel of God.

 

Right away I called my missionary friend Tom in Kobe. We arranged to meet. We talked for hours.

To have met an actual homeless person was amazing. This was the sort of person the Lord Jesus often reached out to. We were finally getting somewhere!

Were there others? Were there other homeless people in Japan?

We had to find out.

 

We inquired among our friends. We asked some missionary colleagues. We asked friends at our churches. We asked neighbors.

But nobody really knew.

We were discovering a nearly universal fact: almost nobody has any firsthand knowledge of homeless people.

 

In the weeks to come, we started to wonder if homeless people were nocturnal. Maybe they hid during the day and only went out at night.

If so, that would explain why mainstream people don’t see them during the day.

At night, we imagined, they would draw less attention to themselves. At night, nobody would notice them scrounging for food in people’s trash cans.

To find them, we surmised, we needed to search at night.

 

So Tom and I became nocturnal.

By day, we were foreign missionaries doing foreign missionary things.

But at night …

 

At night, we were out-and-about. We traveled by train to distant places. We walked and walked and walked.

We asked anyone who would talk to us: where are the homeless people?

 

Eventually, we got a solid lead. Somebody told us about a place way down in the southern part of Osaka. It was a little neighborhood called Airin-chiku.

That was the new name. But most people referred to it by its old name of Kamagasaki.

This was our best lead ever! We were so excited!

 

As soon as we could, we met and then traveled together to Kamagasaki. That meant talking a succession of trains and subways.

The most scenic train ride was aboard the Loop Line. It loops around the heart of the megacity of Osaka.

Finally we arrived at Shin-Imamiya train station. It was our stop.

 

Walking out of the train station, we could see that this was different from any other place in Japan.

There were what seemed like a million men squashed into this tiny area.

They milled about. They walked. Some stared at us, I suppose, in the way that seasoned prisoners stare at a new inmate.

Some men walked up to us, saying, “Ni-chan” (brother) and offered us a can of One-Cup sake from the vending machine.

Other men were asleep, right on the pavement. Still other men were peeing into the gutter, right out in the open, without the slightest concern for privacy.

We saw men who were seriously maimed. We saw a broken arm and serious facial lacerations.

We saw a few men who had the characteristic look of a member of the Japanese Mafia.

Some people referred to the Japanese Mafia with the word Yakuza. However, we were told the word was considered offensive. So we didn’t use it.

 

In some places, the men had started bonfires, right there on the sidewalk. They fueled it with cardboard they had scavenged.

Kamagasaki had its own aroma. Almost everywhere, it smelled like fresh urine. And burning cardboard.

 

We had finally discovered this very special place! There were actual poor people here. There were actual homeless people.

Now what? What should we do?

 

We weren’t aid-workers.

We weren’t part of any church-type outreach program.

We weren’t there to hand out food or clothing or money.

We weren’t there to build an institution.

Our goals were simple. We just wanted to meet some homeless people and tell them God loves them. We hoped to share in their lives a little.

 

While in Kamagasaki, we noted how these poor people lived their lives.

We wanted to experience a little solidarity with them. So we decided to adapt some of their lifestyles into our own lives.

 

We noticed that these homeless men slept on the pavement.

So we sometimes didn’t use a futon. A futon is a thin Japanese mattresses that you lay on the floor.

Instead, we slept directly on the floor of our apartments.

We padded the tatami flooring with a blanket. That way we wouldn’t ruin the tatami with the oils in our skin.

 

We noticed that these homeless men didn’t eat well. So we tried to eat like them, at least sometimes.

If they had the money, they’d buy Onigiri for supper. Onigiri is a triangle-shaped clump of rice that is wrapped in seaweed.

Or if they couldn’t afford Onigiri, they’d buy a can of coffee.

“Can Coffee” was a national staple. It was like a can of soda, but filled with sweet, milky coffee. You bought it from vending machines. It was usually dispensed hot.

Or if the homeless men couldn’t afford Can Coffee, they’d drink green tea.

Those things became our staples.

But they greatly worsened my health.

 

We had begun to take baby-steps of solidarity with these homeless men on the streets of Kamagasaki. This was the right thing for us to do.

We didn’t know it then, but soon, these homeless men would inspire major changes in our lives.

 

RESOURCES

At Wikipedia:

Osaka

JR Loop Line

Shin-Imamiya Station

Yakuza

Futon

Tatami

Onigiri

Canned coffee

 


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