Will the slum remain the same? A visit to San'ya, home to Japan's underclass, where community values are on the auction block

Japan, Inc., April, 2004 by Ty Harvey

"IF San'ya were gone," Jin Kigoshi says of the Tokyo neighborhood around his workshop, "and if these beaten down, good-hearted people were to lose their place to run to, sooner or later they'd destroy Japan."

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KIGOSHI IS A 38-YEAR-OLD craftsman who has lived and worked in San'ya for the past 10 years. He cuts shapes of leather for large shoe manufacturers in a 21st-century workshop that's spacious and well-organized, replete with the newest computers, newest software and one big ultra-modern machine he imported from Italy after several trips to research the shoe industry there.

The machine, the CAD CAM, cost him over $100,000. Unlike the machines that stamp out the same shape of leather over and over for the mass-production of low-priced shoes, the CAD CAM is designed to cut various shapes of leather for the production of small batches of high-end shoes--something that not so long ago required human hands.

"Anywhere you go, you'll find a negative side and a positive side," he explains, trying to describe Tokyo's paradoxical blend of the ancient and the futuristic. "The existence of both brings balance."

The balance is there between Shibuya, in Tokyo's southwest, with its high-rise department stores and Luis Vuitton billboards and herds of giggling schoolgirls in a neon lap of luxury, and San'ya, in Tokyo's northeast, with its half-vacant blocks, littered streets and a thousand homeless men lined up in the park for their one free meal of the day.

And it's there between Kigoshi and others in the community who do work like his.

Consider Kazuo Nidaira, who lives and works only a handful of blocks away. Nidaira also works leather for large shoe manufacturers. In his tiny workshop, packed with pictures and tools, an old sewing machine and a striped squirrel in a cage, Nidaira sits on the floor and does almost all of his work by hand on a cherry wood stump. Nidaira has lived in San'ya all 53 years of his life and has done work for the shoe industry over two decades, but he's more eager to talk about the squirrel than anything else.

People like Kigoshi and Nidaira can be found throughout San'ya, but the area isn't known for its craftspeople and many entrepreneurs. Instead, San'ya is known as the home of Tokyo's day-laborers, a force that has seen little work and even less money since the Japanese economy stumbled a decade ago. In short: San'ya is Tokyo's slum.

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"San'ya has a different soul, a different style," Nidaira explains. The community is tightly knit, he says, and much more down to earth than those found in most of Tokyo's vast neighborhoods.

"While the government of Japan has fought to hide what it considers to be its negative side," adds Kigoshi, "it has created social injustice. And that made a place like San'ya."

The guilt of blood

On my first trip to San'ya, I saw the vacant buildings, the crowds of homeless, and even though I wasn't sure that I was there, I was sure that I was close. So I asked a local shopkeeper where I could find it, and he pointed vaguely in one direction. I asked someone else, and she pointed in another. Later, I found out from a bartender down the street that I'd been in San'ya all along.

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Centered around the small neighborhood of Nihonzutsumi, in Taito Ward, San'ya is not in guidebooks or on subway maps--or any other maps at all. The area dates back to the Edo period (1600-1868), the last era of Japanese casteism. It was in the city's northeast that the "Demon's Gate" was believed to stand, where all evil spirits entered the city. The city's hinin, Japan's lowest caste, were made to live in the area and to do the labor forbidden by the Buddhist faith--the butchering, the curing of skins--so that the wealthy could have their meat and leather, leaving the "inhuman" with the guilt of blood on their hands.

Members of the lowest caste were forced to behead, crucify and incinerate over 200,000 criminals so that the hinin would become the object of the people's disgust--while the shogunate ruled without fear of insurrection.

Today, the statue of Buddha built in the days of the Edo period to appease the souls of those dead criminals sits beside Minami-senju station, blocked from view by surrounding buildings at the former site of the execution grounds. A nearby crossroads still bears the name "The Bridge of Tears," where mourners and spectators crossed a now-dry creekbed on their way to see the convicts die--the statue and street sign testatments to the sacrifices many were forced to make so that a handful could profit.

But such monuments also fuel prejudices that, in spite of the abolition of the old caste system, never died. These reminders mark San'ya as a buraku, an area deemed unclean by the bigoted because of its kinship with the underclass; an area considered by some to be unworthy of the health care and educational systems the rest of Japanese society enjoys, and a home to residents who, regardless of the true class of their ancestors, face discrimination by many Japanese today.