That’s not apple juice.
So every day I take the train to work, right? I go to a station named Tochiomae, which is about a fifteen minute walk from my office. The walk is pretty cool - it takes me by Shinjuku Chuo Park, which is one of the larger parks in the Tokyo area, and it usually has a pretty decent fresh-air aura surrounding it. Makes you not want to die so much in the early morning or something.
Anyways. I walk by this park. But this park is home to many, many homeless. They’re called homeless, but there’s a catch; these guys (and they’re all male) build their own homes. All along the sidewalk, for about the kilometer walk I take next to the park, are all these crude houses that they’ve built for themselves. The basic design is usually a standard camping tent, or more rarely two joined together. Every one of these “homes” is covered by the same blue tarpaulins. The houses all have little makeshift doors and a small wooden plank external to the dwelling for taking your shoes off. Most of the have a little chimney hole built into them so on colder days you can see the smoke coming out from the top and smell their food cooking.
Oh yeah, cooking. They cook. Decently too, they probably have much more nutritional content in their diet than me. They usually sit together in groups for breakfast, supper (and probably lunch though I don’t walk by at that time) and cook together over either a grill or an open fire. This is all taking place on a 1.5 meter wide sidewalk.
So these guys never bother anyone. They never ask anyone for food, water, money or anything - they never even glance at the people walking by. They’re like the total opposite of the homeless in Toronto.
One thing that freaked me out though, is that on days when it rains, they obviously don’t want to run into the park to go to the bathroom. So on a miserable day, there are bags next to the doors of all these houses filled with yellow liquid. But excepting that minor point, I cannot believe how well these guys manage to create their own places there. I don’t envy them, but I definitely respect them.
Ron said,
January 30, 2004 @ 4:48 pm
I recall being blown away by that tale when I heard you tell it over the holidays. You left out the part about the bags of piss though; neat detail.
I definitely have way more respect for those people than for the countless mobs of bums that accost you when travelling in downtown Toronto, or any other North American city I’ve been to. However, in a way, I envy them; they live in their own little self-supporting community, like a family, and they have no bills to worry about, no other modern-day bullshit… just the basics: eat, shelter, sleep. Ah, the simple life.
Tech Knight said,
January 30, 2004 @ 5:07 pm
You gotta figure though, that anyone (homeless dude or otherwise) setting up and living in a camping tent on a Toronto street is asking to be evicted and arrested, if not first abused by ne’er-do-wells.
derek said,
January 31, 2004 @ 12:52 am
I agree with Tech Knight. However, you have to wonder whether or not the homeless in Toronto (and such) would be harassed as much if they didn’t go after passerby’s for $$ etc. (be it police or what have you).
I’m not trying to pass the blame, in a country like ours, or Japan, for anyone to live on the streets is just plain crazy. It’s either a failed experiment in social or economical engineering, or laziness, or just plain human idiocy. Regardless, I usually carry change when walking through downtown areas, if not for my conscious, but bad karma has a way of biting you in the ass.
Luke said,
February 1, 2004 @ 8:00 pm
I left out the urine bags since I didn’t see them until recently.