Los Angeles’s recent count of unhoused residents at over 53,000 makes the official homeless count for entire country of Japan at just over 6,200 in 2016, seem like almost a dream for the city of LA. Even with more than double the population of LA, the numbers for unhoused people living in Tokyo’s 23 wards also stands at the relatively low total of fewer than 2,000 residents. Community activists are among those who suspect that the number is actually much higher, and two films screened on June 21 at Echo Park Film Center showed that the daily lives and perspectives from Tokyo’s homeless communities can tell us far more than any number. One message was particularly clear: communities of unhoused people in Tokyo are facing increasing pressures to disappear entirely by the Tokyo 2020 Olympics, and like in Los Angeles, they are fighting back.
The NHK World documentary by filmmaker Michael Goldberg, Tokyo’s Homeless: In the Shadow of the Olympics was screened alongside Nerve Macaspac’s film Vanishing Community which he made as part of UCLA’s Urban Humanities Initiative (UHI), a program aimed to bridge the divide between design and the humanities. The films show scenes from the historic day laborer neighborhood of Sanya, the bank of the Sumida River, Miyashita Park just outside of Shibuya Station, and other sites around Tokyo where unhoused people have established their own lives and communities.
Both films feature scenes of resistance against the most recent evictions in and around Miyashita Park in the Shibuya Ward. In the discussion after the films, two other UHI Alumni, KT Bender and Aaron Cayer, spoke about what they had learned in the first UHI trip to Tokyo, where they interviewed unhoused residents and organizers at Miyashita Park. Their short film, Miyashita Undercommons, demonstrates that what stood out in those conversations were the tensions and contradictions in who counts as citizens and therefore legitimate users of urban public spaces like Miyashita Park. This park had been home to over 100 unhoused residents, but they were evicted by force in 2010 after the city made a deal with the Nike Corporation to rename and renovate the park into partially pay-to-play facility that was locked at night. Organizers and supporters came together to successfully stop the name change and secure some spaces below the park for people to sleep, and are coming together again to fight the new wave of Olympic redevelopment.
Some residents in and around nearby Meiji Park are being evicted for the second time by the Olympics, first for the 1964 Games, and now, again for the 2020 Games. A global history of the Olympics makes it plain, we need homes, not games. Anti-Olympics organizers in Tokyo stand in Solidarity with NOlympics LA.
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