The Peer Relationships among the Homeless People in Kamagasaki, Osaka

Focusing on their Reciprocity

Abstract

 In Kamagasaki, one of the biggest towns of day laborers in Japan, homeless people usually call one another “peer”. What relation is this “peer”?

 The homeless people are largely dislocated from the bonds of family, and most of them are out of employment. Therefore we used to image that they are isolated and lonely. Especially in the realm of social welfare, they have been regarded as objects of assistance that is one-sidedly given. In the preceding researches of street people, “groups” became the key concept in 1990’s when the corrugated paper houses of the street people remarkably increased in Shinjuku, Tokyo. After twenty years, the tents pitched with bluesheets, and the huts of the homeless, have been compulsorily withdrawn from the urban parks and riversides.

 The homeless people in Kamagasaki spend their nights at various street sides or in the shelter, are in residential instability. How have they come across with other homeless, and begun to develop their peer relationships? Their peer relationships are not assistancegiving. I think that the reciprocity in their peer relationships consists of non-institutional street-survival strategies that they have created by themselves. In this paper, first I give an outline of the social relations among the homeless people in the preceding researches with each social context, continuously trying to describe the characteristics of peer relationships among the homeless people in Kamagasaki based on the interviews with them; therefrom I want to study how we live along with others, and what relationships with others does to resist against social exclusion in today.

 Their reciprocity in peer relationships is the network of mutual expectations beyond time, and is that they don’t pass over the other’s destitutions. I conside how important it is that we are along with others in various circumstances, and that we are linked together by our fragilities.