Abstract
“Yoseba” is the place where day-laborers gather, live in inns called “Doya”, and get jobs in Japanese metropolise. There, a social world is constructed by “Yoseba Rôdôsya (the day-laborers in Yoseba)”. This paper tries to describe the society in Yoseba situated in Sanya area, Tokyo, from two perspectives. The first one deals with the moral order, which put norms on the relationship in Yoseba. The secend one concerns the ambivalence of the social identity of Yoseba Rôdôsya.
In Yoseba, Yoseba Rôdôsya commit themselves to a restricted relationship in which they mutually avoid to touch on their past and their hard private lives. This restriction is normalized among them, and it gives them feeling of belonging to a same kind of people who share the similar career and life. Therefore, Yoseba society is ordered through this norm and induce the so-called “we feeling” without generating a concrete role structure. This feeling is reinforced by sympathizing experience of the hard work.
“Yoseba-Rôdôsya” is a discriminating label in Japanese urban society. Thus, their social identity in relation with the outside society tends to wear a negative quality. However, they find another positive kind of social identity in the relationship among themselves. This positive identity saves them from the sentiment of self-humilation. In this way, their self identity is split between positive and negative, and thus remains to be an ambivalent and unstable one.
