"There is no work now. If big companies like Toyota are firing people, why should there be any work here for us? If big banks in the U.S. collapse, why should there be any work here for us? " says Hiroshi Nakao, 59 year old, former construction day laborer, who currently survives by picking through garbage and selling what he can. He is one of the hundreds of graying men in Kamagasaki, Osaka, Japan. It used to be a thriving day laborer's town. Today it is home to about 25,000 mainly elderly former day laborers, with an estimated 1,300 who are homeless. It used to be called a "laborers town" but now it's called a "welfare town" - a dumping ground of old men. Alcoholism, poverty, street death, suicide, TB and most of all loneliness prevail here. They don't have family ties and live and die alone as social outcasts from the mainstream "salary man" culture.
Labor towns, like Kamagasaki, are on the verge of extinction in Japan. According to the most recent government report, its economy, the world's second largest, is deteriorating at its worst pace since the oil crisis of the 1970s, setting off more unemployment among young and educated and lay-offs among big corporations like Toyota, Nissan, Canon, Sharp, Panasonic, NEC, Hitachi, and TDK and lists go on. It is even more hopeless for graying men of construction industry here to get work.
The average age of the workers here is 58, just below the age of 65, officially eligible age for government assistance.There used to be a lot of work here, they say, and that they made a decent living as construction workers, carpenters, or through odd jobs. Now because of the recession coupled with their age, there is no work for them other than the occasional government sponsored job mopping the floor of the labor center where once they would come to search for high paying jobs.
