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Strategies & Market Trends : JAPAN-Nikkei-Time to go back up? -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: borb who wrote (1666)	12/31/1998 1:12:00 AM
From: chirodoc	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 3902

WEDNESDAY DECEMBER 30 1998 Recession leaves homeless in cold Osaka is struggling to cope with the number of people living rough on its streets, reports Alexandra Harney At 6pm every evening in a neighbourhood in Osaka, Japan's second largest city, an entire community is uprooted. Gathering duffel bags, umbrellas and backpacks, clutching canned coffee and bags of potato chips, hundreds of men queue for hours for a ticket that gives them a futon in a tent and a packet of biscuits for the night. These are the homeless of Airin, a square mile of Japan's largest industrial city lined with abandoned cars, overturned shopping carts and discarded bicycles. It contains Japan's largest homeless population - conservatively estimated at 1,200 people. They represent the darkest side of the Japanese recession. Japan's prolonged economic slump has driven the unemployment rate up to 4.4 per cent, the highest in the post-war period, and has forced thousands of manufacturing and construction workers out of their jobs. In the Kinki region, which includes Osaka, the jobless rate reached 5.2 per cent last quarter. Government stimulus packages worth thousands of billions of yen have had little, if any, impact. The authorities appear incapable of coping with the crisis. In a scene that has been repeated countless times in homeless areas in Tokyo, the Osaka government this week forcibly removed homeless people from the Airin area to satisfy residents' complaints about the smell. "Not a single one of the people here is working. Just look at their faces. Would you hire them?" says a man standing at a brightly lit bank of vending machines next to the line of homeless people awaiting their shelter tickets. Behind him, men are picking used glass jars out of a recycling bin to get a drink of water. According to a study commissioned by the Osaka city government, there were 8,660 homeless people living within the city limits in August. While the largest group is concentrated in the Airin area, the others are crowded into parks, train stations, and on street corners around the city. Some of the homeless are registered as day labourers, which makes them eligible for contract work such as building houses, surveying land, and doing simple carpentry. But recession has reduced demand for casual labour. "The good people are all taken, and the older people naturally lose out," says Yutaka Izumi, the Osaka official in charge of the city's homeless policy. The central government's welfare policy has been of little help. City officials admit the criteria for receiving welfare benefits vary by region and require examinations many homeless people are reluctant to endure. Worse, the government has been cutting its welfare spending. The official shelter system is also relatively underdeveloped. Tokyo, where a study this summer found the number of homeless had ballooned from 600 people to 4,300 in a year, has only two shelters which open for four months during the winter with capacity for only 300 people. City officials argue that Japan's inability to respond to the increase in its homeless population is not simply one of bureaucratic oversight but the result of public opposition, budgetary difficulties and official disputes. "There are several ways to look at the homeless problem. Some people see the homeless as wretched, pitiful, and they want us to help them. But other people, who work so hard to support their families and pay their taxes, ask why we have to take their taxes to help the homeless people, who are not working and just lying around," says Mr Izumi. Toshiaki Mori, a city official who has been studying homeless policies in the US and Europe, says: "Japan's homeless are not like those in America or Europe, where they have families. Here, they are single and male. But the scale of the problem in Osaka has come to a point where something must be done." Yesterday, the Tokyo government said it had decided to postpone its campaign to build a support centre for the homeless until next year because of local opposition. The recession has prompted officials from five of Japan's largest metropolitan areas, including Tokyo, Osaka and Yokohama, to appeal to the central government for additional funding. But in the current fiscal environment such additional spending seems highly unlikely. Disputes over which ministry has authority over the problem have also slowed the response. For the country's homeless, it promises to be a long winter.