Description
Book SynopsisOver the years, Edward Fowler, an American academic, became a familiar presence in San''ya, a run-down neighborhood in northeastern Tokyo. The city''s largest day-labor market, notorious for its population of casual laborers, drunks, gamblers, and vagrants, has been home for more than half a century to anywhere from five to fifteen thousand men who cluster in the mornings at a crossroads called Namidabashi (Bridge of Tears) in hopes of getting work. The day-labor market, along with gambling and prostitution, is run by Japan''s organized crime syndicates, the yakuza. Working as a day laborer himself, Fowler kept a diary of his experiences. He also talked with day laborers and local merchants, union leaders and bureaucrats, gangsters and missionaries. The resulting oral histories, juxtaposed with Fowler''s narrative and diary entries, bring to life a community on the margins of contemporary Japan.
Located near a former outcaste neighborhood, on what was once a public execution g
Trade Review
A fascinating glossary.... Haunting photographs.... All readers must agree that San'ya Blues does indeed give a sense of the 'price paid by a great many' for Japan's economic success, as the author intends, and does so with a respect for historic and social differences.... What this highly personalized fieldwork offers us is crucial glimpses into the relationships incorporating the labor of unwanted men into the nationalized political economy of post high economic growth Japan.
-- Miriam Silverberg * Journal of Asian Studies *
A fascinating book.... Fowler has brought San'ya to life by describing the men he met not as titillating images of despair, but as individual human beings, each with a personal story to tell.
-- Ian Buruma * New York Review of Books *
A remarkable insight into... Japan.... Fowler's highly descriptive account is vividly personal and a fascinating read.
-- Meir Ronnen * The Jerusalem Post Magazine *
Accepted by the day-laborers, Fowler was able to gain a confidence that... allows him to present life-stories in ways both informative and surprising.... Fowler's unabashedly personal approach guarantees not only that the book's subject come refreshingly alive, but that its author does as well.
* Times Literary Supplement *
Anyone who believes that Japanese society is a homogeneous, well-oiled machine—a stereotype often sounded in American media—would do well to read this gritty, firsthand account of life for day-laborers in Tokyo's shunned ghetto district, San'ya.... Fowler's descriptive powers and cultural understanding offer a vivid context for the oral accounts of San'ya inhabitants describing their personal histories and daily lives.... A vivid, if depressing, account of an urban Japanese underclass that bears a surprising resemblance to America's own inner-city population.
* Publishers Weekly *
This book offers a vivid personal tour of the San'ya district and its denizens, culled from many repeated visits by Fowler which culminated in a six-week stint as a day laborer.... He came to realize that... 'San'ya's inhabitants collectively give the lie to so much of what is being said and written about Japan.'
* Japan Quarterly *
