Japan: Homeless People Living in Plastic Capsule Hotels
January 4th, 2010Via: New York Times:
For Atsushi Nakanishi, jobless since Christmas, home is a cubicle barely bigger than a coffin — one of dozens of berths stacked two units high in one of central Tokyo’s decrepit “capsule” hotels.
“It’s just a place to crawl into and sleep,” he said, rolling his neck and stroking his black suit — one of just two he owns after discarding the rest of his wardrobe for lack of space. “You get used to it.”
When Capsule Hotel Shinjuku 510 opened nearly two decades ago, Japan was just beginning to pull back from its bubble economy, and the hotel’s tiny plastic cubicles offered a night’s refuge to salarymen who had missed the last train home.
Now, Hotel Shinjuku 510’s capsules, no larger than 6 1/2 feet long by 5 feet wide, and not tall enough to stand up in, have become an affordable option for some people with nowhere else to go as Japan endures its worst recession since World War II.
Once-booming exporters laid off workers en masse in 2009 as the global economic crisis pushed down demand. Many of the newly unemployed, forced from their company-sponsored housing or unable to make rent, have become homeless.
as usual, the NYT misses the main point. the large numbers of people laid off over the last 15 months from manufacturing jobs were mostly hired by major manufacturers and their suppliers through temping agencies. huge numbers of Japanese and non-Japanese have been working in factories up and down the country for about a decade with no job security or normal employee benefits whatsoever. a low hourly wage and a contract rolled over every 3 to 36 months. once the contract expired, if the company didn’t need them anymore, end of job and in many cases end of (company) housing. in other words, US-style non-union manufacturing employment practices have been adopted in Japan by stealth.
in Japan, full-time, regular employees (“sei-shain) are almost impossible to lay off unless a company closes up completely. usually, restructurings invove shifting people out of dying divisions into growing ones. but in the last decade, most companies have avoided hiring regular employees as mush as possible, and instead use temping agencies to staff their offices and factories.