The Hidden Slums Of Tokyo

      In Mike Davis’s book Planet of Slums it talks about how slums are places that lack one or more of the following durable housing of a permanent nature that protects against extreme climate conditions, sufficient living space which means not more than three people sharing the same room, Easy access to safe water in sufficient amounts at an affordable price, Access to adequate sanitation in the form of a private or public toilet shared by a reasonable number of people and Security of tenure that prevents forced evictions. It is these areas within a city that contain a large portion of the city’s overall poor and working classes. Slums are almost like illegal little cities that rise up with in a city and are constructed by the lower classes to try to provide for themselves. Unfortunately, the city government does not normally acknowledge the legitimacy of slums and thus tend to plan to clear out the slums. However, Davis points out that governments tend to forget that these slumdwellers are a big part of the city and help keep it running. The people who live there may live in poor conditions, but they are still performing a service for their cities as they go to work and support the country’s economy through the jobs that they do down to the little shops that they may run. This contribution is commonly over looked by their city government officials as they only can see rundown buildings and shacks that take up prime real estate where they would rather build a brand-new golf course or some other buildings that won’t serve to help the people of the slums.

Tokyo slums are hard to find and almost seem to be non-existent due to the city’s work to improve and change constantly. This makes the slums of Tokyo completely different to much of the rest of the world and makes it hard to research this topic. However, like all global cities Tokyo still has poor neighborhoods.

One such place that comes close to the idea of a slum is in what used to be the Sanya district of Tokyo. The Atlantic mentions the Sayna district in the article “From Opposing Viewpoints in Context” as a place where the “underclass” live, who are known as the burakumin or “hamlet people”. Such poor neighborhoods of Tokyo mainly hold the poor or outcasts of the Tokyo society and are very well hidden while still being in plain sight. The Tokyo slums lack many of the things that we might normally see in slums across the world. There are no self-built houses completely made up of garage doors or other random materials. Instead, Tokyo low income neighborhoods resemble slightly run-down neighborhoods filled with the poor and those forced to move into the cities from the countryside.

In “San'ya Blues: Laboring Life in Contemporary Tokyo”, James Roberson talks about the slum that used to exist in Tokyo called San’ya. Much like any slum it was a place that many the lower class had to live in due to poverty. In this case, many of the people that frequented the San’ya slums were day-labors, people hired and paid that day. Much like the people of slums in other places those in Tokyo’s slums had to constantly perform grueling work just to put food out on the table for their families.

According to Liverani, the people of Sanya make up an interesting district as its made up of the homeless, foreign students, no-budget travelers and day-workers. The actual cityscape of Sanya is made up of vacant buildings and almost completely empty streets, which is much different to the bustling crowds of most of Tokyo. The district started out as a home to the burakumin, or the lower caste back in the Edo times and was the place that almost all the “impure” jobs that were needed to be done were carried out, which were jobs dealing with blood, such as butchering and skin curing, etc. One such job was the taking of human life in which the burakumin killed criminals and buried them in mass graves. Due to Sanya’s dark past the name holds a negative connotation that relates to poverty, crime and death. This is why the government has tried to remove the name almost completely off the map to help uplift the Sanya district to be a more prosperous area.  

“Japan times”, wrote about an eviction of people from their slum in Tokyo in the article “Shinjuku cardboard city razed”. A small cardboard city existed in an underground passageway near Shinjuku Station in 1996. Compared to other cities the slums we see in Tokyo are very different. This little settlement was like a slum as it had the setup of self-made homes, much like what people might see in other global cities but in this case, they were using cardboard for their construction. This cardboard city was its own small city which consisted of the homeless and day-workers. And much like other slums they also faced eviction. Their place of living was not considered legal and thus they faced being forcible removed from their homes and their settlement cleared out. Slums are not a place that any city really desires to have within them as it show that their clean and fancy city isn’t all that it appears to be. Due to this they are not welcomed anywhere, leaving the people of the lower cast in a difficult situation since they have nowhere else to go.