Ogawa Tetsuo has lived in a tent in
Yoyogi Park near Tokyo’s Harajuku Station for three years. As with
other parks in Tokyo and other cities, Yoyogi became a place where
hundreds of homeless gathered to make their lives. Over the past year
the parks’ homeless population has shrunk significantly as government
housing programs have moved many of the people who lived there to
temporary housing in standard apartments.
Ogawa has been running an
outdoor café in front of his tent for two and a half years,
where people can come and sit on the sofas and chairs set out under the
trees and have coffee or tea. The café does not accept money,
but only exchange of things, so anyone, with or without money, homeful
or homeless, can come. The name of the café, Enoa-ru, is a play
on words. Literally, it means “place with pictures,” but it is also
reminiscent of the Japanese pronunciation of Renoir (Renoa-ru) which
also happens to be the name of a Japanese café chain.
Ichimura Misako, an
artist who also lives in the park, runs a weekly painting circle where
people from the community can come together to draw and paint. Artwork
from the painting circle adorns the trees around the café,
making it a place with pictures.
Untitled, by Ogawa Tetsuo
Ogawa has written about
his ideas on a number of topics from public space, to garbage, to
social work in the August 2006 issue of the journal Gendai Shisō
(Contemporary Thought). One of his ideas, squatting, struck me as
particularly central. “Squatting is the epitome of human life. The
reason is that while nobody can lay claim to all the land, everyone has
a body, and so occupies at least the space that their body takes up.
This is most obvious in the case of a sleeping body. Sometimes the
homeless aren’t even afforded the space for their own body, and are
chased off park benches and street corners. For me being human is in
living this paradox between taking the space you need for your body and
by extension your life, and the fact that no one can lay claim to all
the land. Today’s society tries to solve (or hide) the paradox by
dividing land into public and private, and letting people buy their
private space. But the more you try to hide the paradox, the stronger
the powers of regulation and violence have to grow. Without recognizing
that everyone lives this same paradox, generosity towards others and
humility within oneself would never be possible. It is the lives of the
homeless that embody and suffer this paradox most closely, and so it is
their life that suggests the departure point towards a different
world.” (128)
 
Untitled, by Ogawa
Tetsuo.
[Original drawings include the names of the people in them, but these
have been removed for publication.]
Interview
with Ogawa Tetsuo 2006.08.04
Interviewer,
Justin Jesty
Justin: Do you think of
your own life as “street” life?
Ogawa: Well living in a park is definitely living in a public place so
it might be part of the street in that sense, but if you take street to
mean a road, like an urban road, it’s a little different. The people
living here in the park have the option of going to the street. Some
people go and set up things to sell on the side of the street. The
person who was living next to me over here used to do that everyday:
put his things in a cart and push them down to the street to sell them.
So there’s a strong sense of going to a different place when we go out
to the street. Here in the park I’ve never had the impression of being
in the street or right in the center of the city.
J: It’s pretty quite here.
O: Not so many people come by this way.
J: So you can choose when you want to go into the street and when you
don’t.
O: Right, when we go, there’s always a sense of going out into the
street. So compared to people like Tachibana, and other homeless people
who are actually living in the street, being in the park here is a
different thing.
J: Who is Tachibana?
O: Tachibana Yasuzumi. He lives in Osaka, in Tennōji Park. There’s a
zoo
in the park and a road that runs above it, and he and a few others have
built shelters along the road. He’s a poet. He’s pretty well known.
[Page with link to his blog site: http://hexageon.cool.ne.jp/ikiru/ikiru_top.html]
J: Have you met him?
O: Yes, sure. He came up here and stayed with me for a little while.
But the place where Tachibana sets up his shelter is almost literally
in the road. Some of his things actually sit in the road. So the people
walking by on the sidewalk pass very close to where he lives. Of course
there are bad things that come with this – people have attacked him.
But there’s something interesting too about this constant direct
contact. He attaches pieces of paper with messages written on them to
the outside of his house: simple things like “No War,” and also some of
his poems, writing them out in big letters to attach to his tent. And
this kind of thing only works because it’s right in the street.
Compared to that, there’s a buffer here where I am.
J: Sounds really hard, living right in the street, with no place to
withdraw to.
O: If you actually try it I’m sure some interesting things would come
out of it too. But it’s probably hard to relax much.
J: When did you start living in Yoyogi?
O: About three years ago. Three years ago in June.
J: What were you doing before that?
O: I was sojourning.
J: You mean you were staying in a places you didn’t live in.
O: Right. So sojourning is when you stay somewhere where you’re not the
owner of the house. I stayed with a lot of different people – sometimes
families, and sometimes people living on their own. They put me up in
their houses. [Translator’s note: the Japanese term here is 居候 (isōrō).
This basically means crashing or freeloading, but has a wider usage and
a slightly less negative connotation than those. People who are between
jobs and need to impose on the friends are doing isōrō. Also if you
travel to a country where you have a friend living and stay with them
for a few days on vacation, that’s called isōrō. It’s for this reason
I’ve used sojourning, in its meaning of spending time in a place you
don’t live.]
J: I have the feeling that in the past this kind of thing was more
common.
O: Yeah, a long time ago there were a lot of different ways people
might live with another family. For example, there’s a Japanese word
for a student who would go and live together with their teacher’s
family while they were studying. Families and houses were bigger too,
so there were a lot of unused rooms.
J: With so many people living alone, rooms have gotten a lot smaller.
O: And most of the people I was staying with lived in pretty small
places – usually just one room apartments. So it was actually a little
too small for sojourning.
J: You’d stay for a week or two at each place?
O: About that - the longest I stayed somewhere was one month. When I
moved in with someone I’d always tell them how long I was going to be
there and what date I was planning to leave. I lived that way for about
seven years.
J: Did you stay with different people each time?
O: Actually the way I was thinking about it, I didn’t want to stay with
each person just once and then leave, but rather come back a few times.
So I came back to the same people, after a year or two had passed. I
wanted to continue and sustain the relationships. There were people I
didn’t get along with and places it didn’t go too well, so I didn’t go
back if that happened. But whenever I could, I tried to go back and
renew my stay with people. Altogether I think I stayed at about thirty
different places.
J: You like exchanging goods with people at the cafe. Did you do the
same kind of thing back then too? Try to give something or share
something with people you stayed with?
O: I didn’t do anything like that too self-consciously. If it was like,
“Let me stay and I’ll do this thing for you,” I didn’t think it would
be very interesting, so I didn’t set out to exchange things. But when I
was at someone’s house I was usually the one who had more time, so I’d
do the cooking and cleaning and shopping.
J: Did you exchange information a lot between people? Like, you hear an
interesting story or information or ideas from one person and you bring
it along to the next person and say it to them?
O: Yes that happened. I also put together a newsletter called
“Sojourner Life.” Me and the person I was staying with would exchange
written messages with each other when we had free time. Today it would
be something like chat or instant messaging, but we used pieces of
paper and wrote messages and left them for each other. I made the
newsletter just by taking those exchanges and putting them all
together. I didn’t edit them at all, just put them together into a
newspaper. I made about one issue per month. There were a few people
who invited me to stay with them after they read it. It also worked as
a publicity thing for people who didn’t know what sojourning meant.
They could read the newsletter and get a sense for what it was like.
J: You must have made a lot of them over seven years.
O: Probably about 80 issues.
J: In the form of a conversation, and dialogue.
O: Yes. And that way, people who just have no idea about the lifestyle
of living with other people can get some insight into it. Also if you
read a few issues together, like the issue from the first visit, the
second visit, the third visit with a particular person, you can see how
the people and the relationship change.
J: A lot of people keep diaries. This is more like a two person diary.
O: Right, right. At the time, I wasn’t thinking about trying to develop
my own ideas. I really wanted the relationship to come out, the
relationship of sojourning, living in someone else’s house.
Untitled, Ogawa Tetsuo
J: Do you still have them?
O: Yeah I still have them.
J: Do you go back and read them a lot?
O: No, I don’t do that (laugh).
J: I’ve tried to keep a diary a few times. But I think I didn’t
really want to keep a diary for its own sake. More like I was imagining
myself reading it in the future and trying to write something for that
future me. Never really got very far like that though. It’s kind of
dull, like a chore.
O: I see what you mean. I actually started to keep a diary since coming
to live in the park. When I was doing the sojourner life I didn’t keep
one – I just made the newsletter. But since coming to the park I felt
like I wanted to write things down. Everyday is interesting and I
wanted to record it for myself. I think it’s the first time I’ve kept
one.
J: What kind of things do you write?
O: Pretty much just what happens each day. Today this person came and
we talked about this. Or this or that happened.
J: Even the little things change, like who you meet, what you do. If
you just live each day you don’t notice them, but they change slowly
over time.
O: So if you record them and look at them over later it’s interesting.
How they change.
J: Recently, I don’t know why, maybe it’s just that time for things.
I’m 31 and so all my friends from college are having babies. My three
best friends all had a baby in two months. I talked to one of them, and
she was telling me how with her baby, a really small baby, it’s
something that changes into a different thing, a different person
everyday. It’s always changing. She said it’s the first time she’s
encountered a presence that you absolutely can’t put into a category or
box.
O: Is she recording it?
J: Hmm. I doubt it somehow. Sounds really tough – they can’t get enough
sleep. But now I think about it they’re taking a lot of pictures.
O: People nowadays take video a lot.
J: Yeah, everyone seems to have a video.
O: What do you think about that? When the child grows up and can watch
a video of themselves when they were a baby?
J: I don’t really know. There’s no video from when I was a baby. What
would it be like to see yourself a tiny baby, crying and stuff.
O: You can’t imagine it right?
J: Can’t imagine. I don’t really want to see it. But then again, I
really do want to see it.
O: It’s so graphic. I mean you have photographs, and they give you an
objective view of yourself, but they’re more like little seeds. Video
is so graphic.
J: You can make stories about photographs. Like you have photos of,
say, Christmas, and you put them in with your memory. You have your
memory and you can mesh it together with the photographs. But with
video your memory doesn’t have a chance.
O: Right, you can’t resolve the two. Any memory would just get
overpowered. And it’s not just you in a video right? There’s video of
you together with your mother, so you can see the video of the
relationship between you and your mother at that age. That’s a little …
J: Yeah what if you’re mother’s sexy [laugh]? But when you think about
childhood memory, your parents are invisible. A memory you can’t see. I
can see my friends, my older sisters, but my parents …
O: Right, right. Your parents are like the air. They’re so fundamental
they don’t even register. They’re not estranged. But I think my memory
starts later than other people. It doesn’t really seem to get going
until about fourth grade.
J: Mine doesn’t start until about third grade I think.
O: That’s later than most people.
J: I don’t know. I feel like before that my brain was a totally
different thing.
O: You think? I like to think it was because I was really happy. Or at
least, there wasn’t anything really bad.
Untitled, Ogawa Tetsuo
J: Do you still stay at
people’s houses sometimes?
O: I never up and decided to stop doing the sojourner life. I thought
it might be interesting to try living in the park for a while, so I
gave it a try, and then ended up staying here. I was originally
planning to do both. You know, maybe live as a sojourner in the winter,
and live in the park for the rest of the year. But it didn’t feel right
to do both, like it was neither one nor the other. I felt like I should
choose one.
J: Seems like the amount of baggage you can have would be completely
different.
O: When I was sojourning, I just had one backpack of things. So when I
first arrived here three years ago, that’s all I had with me, the one
backpack and a one person tent I bought at the store. I didn’t have
plates or anything, so at the beginning I would eat off the styrofoam
trays from the supermarket. But when you live here for a while,
gradually the other people start to give you things: pots, plates. Then
you gradually accumulate stuff.
J: Yes, all this stuff is amazing. It will be hard to move. [The park
management is threatening a complete clearing of the park in September
or October of this year for the purpose of doing upkeep and
beautification. If this happens Ogawa and the other people living there
will have to leave.]
O: When I was sojourning, I would never have imagined having all this
stuff.
Untitled, Ichimura Misako
J: I’ve heard that people
come and stay with you sometimes too, that people can stay in one of
your tents. So it’s kind of like people coming to sojourn with you.
O: People definitely come and stay, but I’m not sure if I’d call it
sojourning … I’ve had a few foreign people stay with me. A Korean
person called Chu, who was kind of a Korean dropout. The word in Korean
is “white hand” (paek su). He was a writer. I think he was writing
non-fiction, either a book, or as a journalist. But he didn’t have any
money at all and was sleeping in the parks. So he came and stayed here
for about 10 days. We had a chijimi party.
J: Sounds nice. Did you speak in Japanese?
O: He couldn’t speak Japanese, so we spoke in English. A French guy
stayed here too.
J: How do they find you?
O: Everyone has a different story. But in the case of the French guy,
he was just walking by on the path over there and saw the place. He was
an artist, traveling around the world and making things as he went. He
was really interesting. He gathered up trash and junk and made things
out of it. We had an exhibition while he was here, that we called Halō
Gomi (Hello Trash).
J: Halō Gomi?
O: Yeah, and another one called Dokodemo Jitensha (Everywhere Bicycle).
J: [Laugh.] Those are funny names. Speaking of names, how did the name
Enoa-ru come about. Did it just come to you one day?
O: Yes, but it comes from Ichimura, from before she started actually
living here. She used to come and hang out here a lot, and she’s a
painter. She sometimes painted things for the homeless people living
here so that they could decorate their places. I don’t know if people
asked her, or if she just gave them to people. She was often talking
about an “e no aru seikatsu (a life with pictures).” That’s where it
comes from – e no aru got extended to e no a-ru, but at that point it
hadn’t yet occurred to me to start a café here.
J: Just the name.
O: Right, there was just the name. Then about three months after I
started living here in the park, I went on a trip and was thinking
about what I wanted to be doing here, and had the phrase in my mind,
“life with pictures,” “e no a-ru.” And then the café idea hit me.
J: So the pictures came first.
O: Right. Even before she started living here, Ichimura mentioned to me
that she wanted to start a painting circle. She’s still doing it now in
fact. When I first heard it, I wasn’t sure if it would work. I mean
most of the people here are middle aged and older men so I didn’t think
they’d take it seriously. But after seeing the first meeting it was
different – some good people came and it went well. It meets once a
week.
“Painting Circle,” by
Ogawa Tetsuo
J: Is it for teaching
drawing and painting, or more of a chance to have people come and spend
some time together?
O: Some people come and draw, but there are also a lot of people that
come just to chat.
J: Is it mostly people who live in Yoyogi Park?
O: Now there’s more people who have been moved to live in apartments.
The new policy came into effect last April, and people started moving
into the apartments from last summer. About 80% of the people who were
here are now living in apartments.
J: And people still come back here for the painting circle?
O: Some people come back, some don’t. There’s only about three or four
people who come to each meeting. For me it’s not something we do for
the homeless people, but more a way to meet people we haven’t met
before. Unfortunately since so many people have left, there aren’t very
many people to meet anymore.
J: How have people taken to the apartments?
O: Each person has their own experience so you have to look at each one
to see. The people who are still living here in the park are people who
for whatever reason didn’t want to live in an apartment, or tried to
live in one but found they couldn’t. People are only allowed to stay in
the apartments for two years anyway though, so in either case, if you
stay in the park or if you take the apartment, you’re going to be
chased out in the end. Some people thought it was easier to stay in the
park, some people wanted to live in the apartments.
J: So in 2003, when you first started living here, there were a lot
more people?
O: Yes, 300 or 350 shelters. Grouped in eight or so areas.
Untitled, by Ogawa Tetsuo
J: And they were all
older men?
O: Not all, but the biggest group was 50-something men.
J: Were a lot of them from construction? Were most unemployed?
O: Well, I can’t really say much about everyone’s background. I haven’t
researched it or anything. But compared to some other parks I think the
share of day laborers might have been smaller here in Yoyogi. It’s not
close to any of the day labor markets where people can pick up work, so
maybe there weren’t quite as many people shut out of the day labor
markets as there were in some other parks. There was quite a variety of
people here.
J: So when you arrived, there were about 350 residences, so the society
in the park was already established. How were you able to come into the
community? Did people here welcome you? What was the process?
O: The most common way people come into the community is to have a
friend who’s living here. A person asks their friend, and then can set
up their shelter near where their friend is living. And if that person
already has some standing in the community there’s no problem with it.
That’s the most common way. In my case, I didn’t have anything like
that. I actually did know one Brazilian who had been living here for
about eight years but he was back in Brazil by the time I got here. So
I didn’t know anybody. This can be a problem for some people because
the community here is regulated by people, kind of like bosses.
J: How many of them are there? Just one?
O: There are a few different bosses. But to be honest there really
isn’t that much difference between them and everyone else. I mean no
one here’s very rich. It’s more of a matter of who does the most
talking, so it’s not much of a hierarchy. But nonetheless there are
bosses who have some authority, and when I moved in one of them came
over and asked who I was. I said I wanted to live here and he said,
“You’re still a young kid. Go back and live with your parents.” But I
told him I didn’t want to do that, I just wanted to live here. We
talked for a while and he eventually said it was fine for me to live
here and then even helped me set up my tent. He thought about where a
good place would be and then came back with a shovel and flattened out
the ground for me. So there are a few different ways that people come
into the park and start living here. But there are times when it
doesn’t go well, and people get in fights with the bosses. Some people
are chased out. I’ve seen that happen too.
J: For you being young and able to get a job or go back and live with
your parents, was the difference between you and other people ever a
problem?
O: Before I came I thought people would care about that. But actually
after living here I found that the people here don’t ask too many
things about each other’s backgrounds. They don’t press people on their
pasts. Of course if someone starts talking about things then people
listen, but they don’t ask too many questions. Before I knew that, I
thought I’d better think up a reason for coming to live here, so first
I came up with the idea that I’d hurt my back and couldn’t work. But I
never had to say that. Just got to know people and things went from
there. After I was living here for about a year and was closer with
some of the people, some of them said that when I first moved in they
thought I was the police, investigating something undercover as a
homeless person. There was another misconception too. There was a guy
living next to me who was a healer. He had a shaved head, and did
healing, and went up to the top of the hill and did strange dances all
day. He had been in the US for 30 years, but as soon as he got back to
Japan he started living in Yoyogi Park. So some people thought we were
both part of a religious cult. People don’t necessarily ask about your
story, but they think about it a lot and imagine about each other. But
my reason for being here has never been an issue.
J: I can understand why people don’t press with too many questions.
People have had hard lives.
O: Yeah there are a lot of people with things they don’t want to talk
about. Or, well, if you get close with people open up and talk about
lots of things.
J: So after you started the painting circle people started to come
around and get to know you?
O: Before that too, I tried to establish communication with people as
much as I could, and it’s one of my great joys to get to know new
people. So it seemed like almost everyday I was getting to know new
people. The circle started about half a year after I started living
here, so even before that.
J: You were pretty outgoing about meeting people?
O: Yes. Part of it was from anxiety to be sure, but listening to what
people had to say was really interesting too. But sure, there are a lot
of shady looking people who live here.
J: Are most of the people living here people who have given up looking
for work?
O: They’re definitely not people who are going out to look for work
everyday. I’ve never met anyone doing that. Part of it’s that even if
people look they can’t find anything, especially if you’re over 50. But
also, the fact that people are living here shows that actually they can
get by, they can survive without finding a new job. They can live with
the work they can do here.
J: So people have a lot of time.
O: Right.
J: What does everyone do? Are people interested in games? Mahjong and
stuff? Shogi?
O: There used to be a shelter people used specially for mahjong. There
are a lot of shogi players too. We have a shogi tournament. I was the
champion in the last one. But to go back to the previous question, it
wasn’t only older people living here when I first moved in. There were
other young people, maybe twenty or thirty people in their twenties. So
I wasn’t that unusual. Also there are a few people who have been living
here for twenty or thirty years and they’re not that old, so if you
count back they were probably living here from their twenties. So
people who have lived here for a really long time are usually people
who came when they were young.
“Playing Shogi,” by
Ichimura Misako
J: That’s pretty amazing. If you’ve lived here for that long, I bet
you’d have trouble adjusting to life in an apartment.
O: Yeah they have trouble. The people who have lived here for twenty or
thirty years are still only in their fifties. They have a lot of
knowledge about how to live in the park, but if even things like a copy
machine in a convenience store, is impossible to use.
J: Right – this has been a big thirty years.
O: They might be somewhat of a special case, but going back to a
regular life after living here for twenty or thirty years must be kind
of difficult. If you live in an apartment you can’t make too much
noise, you have to keep your voice down. Everyone here shouts and yells
when they want to, and walks around with no shirt on. But if you live
in an apartment other people are always keeping an eye on you and you
have to be careful about rumors getting started. People living in
apartments are really sensitive, you wouldn’t believe it. You have to
fold yourself up small to live in an apartment.
J: So nobody minds here if you’re naked.
O: Nobody minds. We all see each other when we wash at the water tap
anyway. And people yelling isn’t a big thing either. People get drunk
and start yelling, there are people with mental problems who sometimes
yell, but it’s not a big deal, and nobody gets kicked out because of
it. In an apartment building though, people can get kicked out for that.
J: People get so interested in what the people next door are doing.
O: What kind of place are you living in?
J: I live in a building with four floors, and maybe thirty or forty
apartments. Not so big.
O: Do you talk to the other people living around you?
J: Not much no. Even when I say hello to people there’s not much
response. Only the person who comes to the building to put out the
garbage and sweep the stairs says hello. But this depends a lot on the
particular building I think. When I was living in Chicago, I lived in
two buildings. The first one was just for a year, and it was all full
of graduate students and in that one no one talked to each other. But
for the other three years I was living in a place that was just regular
people, and everyone there was really talkative.
O: There’s a lot of variation in Tokyo too, and when I was sojourning I
could see some of the variation. But in a building with one room
apartments there’s absolutely no conversation.
J: I feel like young people are a little weak on that point. Once
people get into their forties or fifties I feel like they lighten up a
little.
O: Hmm, maybe. But also a lot of the people living in one room
apartments in Tokyo are people who’ve come to live alone here from
other parts of the country. And the living conditions aren’t always
that great. Sometimes people get cheated by landlords and end up paying
a lot of money for a room right by the highway or something. People
who’ve lived in Tokyo for a few generations are definitely more
friendly. But there are people who really want to protect their private
space. They don’t want others to come into it. There are a lot of women
who live alone, and bad things can happen, like people start stalking
them or something. So if you’re worried about something like that I can
see how you’d not want to be too open with people. I was always living
at other people’s houses, so I’m a pretty open person, but I can
understand that some people are afraid of things that might happen.
J: There are a few women who live in my building and I think it would
definitely make them uncomfortable if this foreign man suddenly said
“Hi, how are you?” Especially because we’re in the same building.
They’d rather people don’t know where they live.
O: Living here is kind of the opposite of that. The community itself,
or the ties between people is what keeps everyone safe. That might not
be the only way, but it’s just the way it seems to work. People get to
know each other and then start looking out for one another. So if a
suspicious person comes along they kind of keep and eye on him. And
since I’ve been living here it’s been very safe. Nobody locks anything
up and there’s almost no stealing. That’s a really good thing about
being here.
J: Do young people ever come and beat up the people living here?
O: Since I’ve been living here there haven’t been any incidents like
that. But the further you go back the more common those kinds of things
were. There are a lot of people here who’ve had experiences of that.
There were even cases of people getting murdered in the parks. There
are a few reasons why it’s declined recently. One is more awareness
generally about homeless people. The public has become more enlightened
about the issue and the mass media presents the violence as
unacceptable. But I think the most important thing is that people live
together in groups now. With everyone living close together, attackers
don’t come around anymore. People who have been killed or attacked were
often off by themselves, sleeping on a bench in the open with no tent
or anything. So that’s the most dangerous: being out in the open with
no other people around. People I know who have been living here for
twenty or thirty years have told me it’s pretty recent that everyone’s
gathered together into one spot to set up their houses. Maybe just in
the last few years. Before that it was much more dangerous. Speaking of
that, it feels like it might be getting a little more dangerous now.
There’re far fewer people living here now so the community has thinned
out a lot. And it’s the summer too. But anyway, that’s one place where
I think living here is really different from regular society, the way
that you ensure your own safety. In present day society everyone tries
to establish their own private space, so it all has to be managed and
administered – like you have to punch in your code number to get into a
building. So in order to increase safety things have to get more and
more regulated.
J: So you have a key, and a good sturdy door, and live in a nice
neighborhood where the patrolman comes around to look. People can rely
on these to let them feel safe. But at the same time I feel like no
matter how many of these things you have, it’ll never get rid of the
suspicion, or the feeling of insecurity. No matter how administered it
is, it’ll never get rid of the insecurity inside you.
O: Right, I think all the administration probably makes it even worse,
and then as the anxiety grows the administration grows along with it.
Here, I more or less trust all the people living around me, so in terms
of my own state of mind it’s really comfortable.
Untitled, Ogawa Tetsuo
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