Surviving Tokyo
When Itoshin moved to Tokyo he was totally broke and he survived on those same cheap conbini meals he now salvages from his job. “I lived in a worker dorm. Just 8 guys packed into a tiny room with no window. It stunk so bad!” They all worked irregular hours, meaning the lights were always being turned on and someone was nearly always active, either rousing himself for the start of a long shift or returning from one. Unlike the worker dormitories affiliated with companies, this dorm was just for temporary workers and unlike the images usually conjured by the term, all of Itoshin’s bunkmates were Chinese on short-term contracts. “I was totally alien—Tokyo was so new to me, this big city, and then living with a bunch of Chinese guys…” The dorm was an uncanny effect of globalization, reconstituting the flophouses or doya where day laborers lived in the yoseba and replacing the poor, itinerant workers, many of whom had migrated from rural Japan, with unskilled contract labor from Chinese provinces. The profound juxtaposition of globalizing Japan and shifting proximities and identities for young people is hard to miss: Itoshin had refused the compartmentalizing socializing of his schooling and instead had ended up bunking among young Chinese trainees (kenshūsei) circulated into Japan to make up for a shortage in unskilled labor (Zha 2005, 134). The journey to Tokyo had the unintended consequence of conscripting Itoshin into a class of native contingent workers and unwittingly put him into close quarters with the global traffic in cheap, surplus labor. Unexpectedly he found himself living with the Chinese workers as strange bedfellows.
Their intimate proximity allows us to trace Itoshin’s own failure to acclimate or tolerate the competitive Japanese education system and his desire to experience the global city simultaneous with global capitalism’s adept circulation of bodies across regional and cultural zones in a process of constant dislocation. It was an awkward solidarity, perhaps, in which Itoshin felt doubly alien: a Japanese surprised at the sense of being not-at-home among the Chinese with whom he found it necessary to live within his own country, and out-of place in unfamiliar Tokyo and only beginning to develop the friendships eventually leading to the Lesque house’s social-skate experiment on Japan’s margins.
Their intimate proximity allows us to trace Itoshin’s own failure to acclimate or tolerate the competitive Japanese education system and his desire to experience the global city simultaneous with global capitalism’s adept circulation of bodies across regional and cultural zones in a process of constant dislocation. It was an awkward solidarity, perhaps, in which Itoshin felt doubly alien: a Japanese surprised at the sense of being not-at-home among the Chinese with whom he found it necessary to live within his own country, and out-of place in unfamiliar Tokyo and only beginning to develop the friendships eventually leading to the Lesque house’s social-skate experiment on Japan’s margins.
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