Yokohama Street Life

Yokohama Street Life
Author :
Publisher : Lexington Books
Total Pages : 163
Release :
ISBN-10 : 9781498511995
ISBN-13 : 1498511996
Rating : 4/5 (95 Downloads)

Book Synopsis Yokohama Street Life by : Tom Gill

Download or read book Yokohama Street Life written by Tom Gill and published by Lexington Books. This book was released on 2015-03-06 with total page 163 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Yokohama Street Life: The Precarious Career of a Japanese Day Laborer is a one-man ethnography, tracing the career of a single Japanese day laborer called Kimitsu, from his wartime childhood in the southern island of Kyushu through a brief military career to a lifetime spent working on the docks and construction sites of Tokyo, Osaka and Yokohama. Kimitsu emerges as a unique voice from the Japanese ghetto, a self-educated philosopher whose thoughts on life in the slums, on post-war Japanese society and on more abstract intellectual concerns are conveyed in a series of conversations with British anthropologist Tom Gill, whose friendship with Kimitsu spans more than two decades. For Kimitsu, as for many of his fellow day laborers at the bottom of Japanese society, offers none of the comforting distractions of marriage, family life, or a long-term career in a settled workplace. It leads him through existential philosophy towards Buddhist mysticism as he fills the time between days of hard manual labor with visits to second-hand bookshops in search of enlightenment. The book also portrays Kimitsu’s living environment, a Yokohama slum district called Kotobuki. Kotobuki is a ‘doya-gai’—a slum inhabited mainly by men, somewhat similar to the skid row districts that used to be common in American cities. Traditionally these men have earned a basic living by working as day laborers, but the decline in employment opportunities has forced many of them into welfare dependence or homelessness. Kimitsu’s life and thought are framed by an account of the changing way of life in Kotobuki, a place that has gradually been transformed from a casual laboring market to a large, shambolical welfare center. In Kotobuki the national Japanese issues of an aging workforce and economic decline set in much earlier than elsewhere, leading to a dramatic illustration of the challenges facing the Japanese welfare state.


Yokohama Street Life Related Books

Yokohama Street Life
Language: en
Pages: 163
Authors: Tom Gill
Categories: History
Type: BOOK - Published: 2015-03-06 - Publisher: Lexington Books

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

Yokohama Street Life: The Precarious Career of a Japanese Day Laborer is a one-man ethnography, tracing the career of a single Japanese day laborer called Kimit
Yokohama, California
Language: en
Pages: 177
Authors: Toshio Mori
Categories: Fiction
Type: BOOK - Published: 2015-04-01 - Publisher: University of Washington Press

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

Yokohama, California, originally released in 1949, is the first published collection of short stories by a Japanese American. Set in a fictional community, thes
The Japs at Home
Language: en
Pages: 370
Authors: Douglas Brooke Wheelton Sladen
Categories: China
Type: BOOK - Published: 1895 - Publisher:

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

Memory, Reconciliation, and Reunions in South Korea
Language: en
Pages: 285
Authors: Nan Kim
Categories: History
Type: BOOK - Published: 2016-10-31 - Publisher: Lexington Books

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

Winner of the 2019 Scott Bill Memorial Prize for Outstanding First Book in Peace History Memory, Reconciliation, and Reunions in South Korea: Crossing the Divid
Poetry and Terror
Language: en
Pages: 303
Authors: Peter Dale Scott
Categories: History
Type: BOOK - Published: 2018-08-15 - Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

A study at many levels of Scott’s long poem Coming to Jakarta, a book-length response to a midlife crisis triggered in part by the author’s initial inabilit