Osaka blog.

Now this is summer. Above 80° F downtown today, till it rained hard. (Nearly 30° C for those of you under the spell of metrics.)

We get the Wall Street Journal at the office every workday, as many offices do. On the whole, full of interesting items, even the stories outside the business world. But the paper will never be able to persuade me that people with incomes so small that they don't pay federal incomes taxes are "lucky duckies," at least in any economic sense -- to use the paper's own asinine editorial-page term.

Anyway, on page 1, column 1 today there was an article called "Japan's Homeless Find Their Place in Public Parks." A fairly grim subject, but the article still made my day, because it was Dateline: Osaka. Finally. An article about Japan that isn't about Tokyo. Endless coverage of Japan, and it seems that most of it comes from Tokyo, and is about Tokyo. It's well and good that the city should get a large share of media coverage, since it's the largest city on the archipelago, but I've always felt it got too large a share, as if there were a country called Tokyo, with a few suburbs collectively called "the rest of Japan."

Interestingly, a Japanese student of mine -- an intelligent fellow and a good source, I think -- once told me that Tokyo was never actually designated as the national capital, not at least by the Diet. The government merely assembled itself there at the time of the Meiji Restoration. Old Edo had been the seat of real power under the Tokugawa for some centuries, and when the Emperor Meiji moved there, that put the icing on the cake. Edo then became Tokyo. The etymology is instructive. Tokyo = to, eastern + kyo, capital.

I read the article with special interest, since it turned out that I knew exactly the places the writer describes (it was by Phred Dvorak; interesting name). "Long Economic Slump, Tolerant Attitudes Let Shantytowns Take Root," is one of the subheads, and Dvorak talks about the growth of shanties in such places as Osaka Castle Park and Nishinara Park. A quick look around the Web also tells me that Nagai Park also has a population of the homeless now.

This is sobering. In the early 1990s, there was no homeless population at Osaka Castle Park that I can remember. Osaka Castle, a '30s reconstruction of an ancient castle, is associated with Osaka in the same way that the Arch is with St. Louis, or the Golden Gate Bridge is with San Francisco. The park itself isn't especially large, and I didn't go there too often, though I did attend a memorably drunken picnic in the shadow of Osaka Castle with a Californian and two Kiwis soon after arriving in Japan. Later, after I knew Yuriko, we would occasionally go there.

A decade ago, Nagai Park didn’t sport any Hoovervilles either. I'm certain of that, since I lived a five-minute walk from it. Nagai is really a sports park -- it had a stadium, a long running trail, soccer fields, and numerous other sports facilities. About the only thing it didn't have was a lot of undedicated open space, so I have to wonder exactly where the homeless have pitched their lean-tos.

Nishinara Park was another story. It's in a south Osaka neighborhood heavily populated by Koreans, bunrakunin and day laborers, so it did have a significant homeless population, even in those more prosperous times.

There were also clusters of the homeless in Nakanoshima Park, a long strip of an island in the Yodogawa river, which at that point runs through some of the (theoretically) most expensive land in Japan, since the area was home to many of the Sumitomo keiritsu companies, the Osaka Prefectural headquarters, and the Osaka branch of the Bank of Japan. There were always a few men camped out under some of the pedestrian bridges in Nakanoshima in the early '90s, but I was astonished to see how much the shanty colonies had grown the last time I was there, in early 2000. The tents and the lend-tos even clung to the less-public sides of the local government buildings, like dewy cobwebs on the side of a large tree.

The homeless were also conspicuous along a street near Tennoji Station, which isn't far from Nishinara Park. It was there that I really got a sense of the power of custom. For a few years, I would often meet some friends on Wednesday evenings at an izukaya on a main street radiating from Tennoji Station, a major rain hub in south Osaka.

The pedestrian arcade there was fairly wide, and as soon as the shops began closing for the day, men would set up large cardboard boxes in the arcade and crawl inside to sleep. Usually they would leave their shoes outside the box, as they would at a more conventional home.