so one might ask how it's even possible

That some of its citizens sleep on the streets

In Japan you'll find the homeless in all sorts of places

They're on the riverbanks or no one much bothers them

At night in the stairwells of train stations

when most have returned back to their homes

On the streets with scores of people passing them by

In public parks

and in little communities with makeshift wood frames and tarps

In most instances the homeless reside at the edges

out of the way of the daily commuter

So many Japanese citizens may not even realize

that there are even more than a few homeless people amongst them

According to government figures the homeless living on the streets

only make up one out of every twenty thousand citizens or so

Independent researchers say the real rate is two and a half times higher,

but even at that

It's a small enough percentage that it can be mostly hidden from view

but perhaps what's even more hidden from view

is how and where those who have gotten off the streets are living?

There's a range of places

from emergency shelters to independent support centers

to public housing

to cheap no-questions-asked accommodations

and dorm like rooms set up by poverty businesses

in this video will explore all these places

and how a once homeless person might find themselves in any one of them

let's first talk about emergency shelters and self-reliance support centers

basically the idea is the emergency shelters take people straight off the street

They give you a bath a shower a shave

Send you to the doctor if you have some medical

Problems give you three meals a day and a bed

and

that's

Usually got a maximum length of stay of two months in many cases the idea is

when you finish that the emergency shelter you move on to the

self-reliance Support Center, and these places have a longer length of stay

I mentioned four months in Tokyo in Yokohama and Osaka

It's six months and here they do try to help you get back into mainstream society

they will

Put you on training courses. They will also do things like

help you write your resume lend you a certain time to go to job interviews and

They have well at least in the case of the one in Yokohama

they have people from the local employment exchange you come and visit and

We'll help you look for jobs, so they do try quite hard there.

Now, I'm talking more about Tokyo there are quite big variations between cities

They also give you a certain amount of money to

Help you to rent an apartment

Buy some furniture for it and that kind of thing they don't

give you the money in Yokohama or Osaka, but instead they've got this longer length of stay six months and

Ideally you'll find yourself a job after one or two months

And then you can commute

From the shelter to the job, so you you're not paying any rent

you're still staying for free and getting your meals for free at the shelter, and you're earning money and

The shelter will look after your money because some people have a problem with poor control of their money

but they'll look after it give you a small amount for pocket money each day and

Once your savings have reached a certain point then it may be possible for you to

rent an apartment

It turns out that renting an apartment can be an expensive task one of the big kind of

institutional problems with getting out of homelessness in Japan is the high cost of

Getting into an apartment

Actually nowadays rents themselves are not that high compared with other

industrialized countries for example in Yokohama

you can probably rent a

small modest one-room apartment

With a sort of little unit bathroom and a least a couple of gas rings to to cook on for about

40 or 50 thousand yen

400 or

$500

So that's not too bad, but what can be a problem is before you move into the apartment you typically have to pay

two months worth of rent

To the landlord as a deposit and in some parts of Japan. That's three months

another two months worth of rent as a

non-returnable gift to the landlord and

Another month's rent

To the real estate agent that found the property for you plus the first month's rent upfront

So that's actually can be half a year's rent or more before you even walk through the door, so

one of the things that the shelters do is they try and let you stay there long enough and and

Hopefully get a job and save money for long enough to cross this big a hurdle that

Exists before you can resume

Independent living now. Let's take a tour of a Doya aka a flophouse

So it can be hard for a homeless person to transition into a proper apartment due to the upfront costs required

That's where Doyle's come in as the professor explained in a previous video

There are kind of flophouse keep in mind that this is the Japanese version of a flophouse

Which means while they may not be big or fancy? They can still be organized and tidy a resident was kind enough to give us

The

Decibel for 3ds

Why are you just aah accessing

Your diamond to call hi

Honey hi Remus

Now let's talk about public housing they're fairly easy to spot once you know what you're looking for

The telltale signs are large concrete apartment blocks with numbers on them because they usually come in multiples I asked the professor

Why go for private apartments are accommodations like doors when there's half-decent public housing located around the city?

well, there's a shortage of public housing in Japan it does exist and

It's rationed

There are lotteries you know people get on waiting lists and the top priority is

Single women with children

Single men with no children are very low down the list of priorities. It's difficult for them to

Get on to public housing if you do get on to public housing then the rent is nice and low and the rent is

Calibrated according to your income so the the lower your income is the lower the rent will be in your public housing so

It's it's basically a fair

Well intentioned kind of system, but there's just not enough of it

Yeah, I see that same situation over in Canada, but then the professor started talking about poverty businesses

And I can't say that I've ever heard about these back in my home country

another major player in

Homelessness and poverty problems in Japan is a group of nonprofit organizations

Which are often referred to as poverty businesses and King Kong business and

What they will do is they'll find a homeless person

they will invite that homeless person to come and stay at a

Shelter a private shelter that they have created

themselves and then once the homeless person is in there they they will

Provide lawyers and help that homeless person apply for livelihood protection

So the same homeless person applying for welfare on his own. He may

Appeal to the prejudices of the

Caseworkers and he may get turned away from for various reasons, but that same guy

Having had a wash a shave and had a clean suit of clothes put on him and with a lawyer sitting next to him is

Much much more likely to get his application approved

So that's what they do and up to that point you

Could say they're doing a good job the problem. Is that once the livelihood protection is approved

the

NPO will then take eighty

Ninety percent of the money that comes in from the welfare

payments in the form of rent for the room and

payment for the often very basic meals that they provide and

It can be a very good business

for example

What they'll sometimes do is buy or?

rent a

Company dormitory and empty company dormitory. You know there are plenty of them around and

So you buy it for a relatively low price, and you take a a unit

Let's say it's a

two

dk2 rooms with a dining kitchen space

And the two rooms they'll divide up

They'll put up a

flimsy plywood partition wall in it

So that in each of those rooms two people can stay so this two room apartment

But can now house for homeless people and the the cost to the NPO

60,000 yen a month

And they'll be getting like eighty thousand yen a month each of four guys that they're keeping there, so

You know you can see how the maths works. You can make a lot of money that way and so these

businesses the these NPOs

Are in a kind of gray?

of the law and

They they exploit formerly homeless people, but at the same time

They are responsible for getting thousands and thousands of homeless people off the street, so they are another factor in these

declining

street homeless populations where you'll find many homeless and formerly homeless is in Doig I

Aka Skid Row so the term Skid Row comes from Seattle and are originally referred to help people with skid or drag logs?

Through the city's historic Pioneer Square, this was a rough-and-tumble part of town

And thus the term Skid Row came to define an impoverished area typically urban whose inhabitants are people on the skids this

Specifically refers to the poor the homeless or others either considered disruptive or forgotten by society

Tokyo has its own skid row called Sanya the nature of this area is that it's geared towards transient people as

such

You'll see a lot of coin laundry and lockers it also has services to help the poor whether it be nonprofit organizations health clinics

day-laborer facilities arduous aka flop houses

Similar to touring the flophouse what surprised me about visiting the Doig Eye is that if you didn't really stop and look around

closely you might not even be able to tell you are in it a

Different Skid Row area in Yokohama called Kotobuki Cho has a bit of street

Level activity so you might see someone pushed on a wheelchair are a couple of guys drinking some one cup sake but otherwise looks fairly

normal the biggest giveaway

I could say is that you'll see a lot of bicycle parking on the streets organized parking of course

But a type of parking of not really seen in other areas

I've been through while there are government and NPO efforts to get the homeless off the streets and into housing

However temporary are unglamorous they maybe the fact is that there are still individuals living outdoors. I asked the professor

What the situation on the ground is like the homeless?

Self-reliant support law that I mentioned which was passed in 2002

includes

Article 14 which

empowers the people in charge of running public parks to remove

Homeless people's dwellings from them. That's another reason why that was a controversial law on the one hand it created these various

Facilities to support homeless people on the other hand it. Also had elements designed to get them out of

where they already were and

So we have seen

Moves to kind of gradually push homeless people out of parks and sometimes riverbanks as well

Occasionally it involved

compulsory evictions with large numbers of police that gets all over the TV and

newspapers of course so the Japanese authorities

Don't very often do that it's kind of a last resort

More likely what they'll do is try and entice homeless people away from

the park

By offering them a place in our shelter

Which which may in turn lead to

self-reliance Center, you know these two-tier system I mentioned which

Ideally will eventually get you back into mainstream society

but once but part of the deal is once you've

Once you've gone into the shelter

They will remove your tent or your Shack, and they will also take steps to stop you from going back there for example

putting up

scaffolding or

Road barriers around areas that people used to use to

Sleep in having security patrols go around to stop new people from setting up shacks and tents and in this way they've been

Gradually cleaning out the parks. There are the homeless people's human rights to consider, but on the other hand

Families want to use the parks mothers don't like it if there's a homeless tint

community next to the swings and slides where they and their children want to play and

so the authorities have to try and balance the conflicting interests of different members of

society if you take a look at

Park benches are Japan you'll often find that

they now have more arm rests and

Okay, it's nice to have an armless on your park bench

But it also makes it impossible to sleep on that park bench

I

also encountered other barriers such as this automatic floor that prevents people sleeping at the bottom of the stairs and

This chirping sound most likely designed, so you wouldn't be able to get a good night's rest

Left-wing activists get very angry about that kind of thing and