People Living in the Shadow of the City: A Chapter from the Tokyo Vagrant Village (1974)

People Living in the Shadow of the City: A Chapter from the Tokyo Vagrant Village (1974)

In December 1974, a "hobo village" suddenly appeared on a riverbed near Iidabashi, a scene that highlighted the contradictions of the city. Unable to find work or a place to live, the men living there slept and woke up in huts they had built themselves from found materials or in enclosures made of scrap lumber. They gathered in line at soup kitchens, passed around sake, and talked with each other. These people, who had been pushed out of society, had built their own community in a place within the city but outside of the urban order. While Tokyo in the 1970s was enjoying the afterglow of its rapid economic growth, the phenomenon of "homelessness" settling in parks and riverbeds was becoming increasingly apparent, and the blank spaces left out of urban planning were being filled by "villages" that had been left out of the city plan. The "villages" were created by the lack of urban planning. Similar living quarters existed in other urban centers, such as Shinjuku Central Park a
nd Yamaya, but media attention was still sporadic, and social indifference covered their existence. This reportage conveyed the real breath of people living out their daily lives at the bottom of the city and quietly confronted the social issues lurking in the shadows of economic growth.