You Do Have To Live Like A Refugee

BY TOMOKAZU KOSUGA, TRANSLATED BY LENA OISHI

ILLUSTRATION BY SHINTARO KAGO

This café provides two types of rooms: those with tatami (traditional Japanese straw mats) laid out on the floor and a TV, and those with a single chair, a desk, a computer, and no additional space. Since the tatami spaces only have one TV and no chairs, the extra space is used for sleeping and beating off, I assume. I opted instead for an “individual room,” which goes for about ¥100 per hour. Compared with the usual ¥400 hourly rates at most cafés, this explains its popularity. The rental was half of a room separated by a curtain, and like the others lacked any privacy or protection. Theft is on the rise among café refugees. There were lockers on each floor just outside the elevator, and there was a thick padlocked chain wrapped tightly around the TV and computer, both of which were in bad shape. The keyboard was missing keys and covered in an unsettling gooey film. The floor was dotted with cigarette butts and trash, and the wall was ripped to shreds. So much for Japan’s premier facilities, eh? All of this was in a space just large enough for me to squeeze in between a small desk and a reclining chair. Still, Japanese people, as a rule, find comfort in small spaces. I was no exception. Were it not for the persistent cigarette-induced hacking of my neighbor, I would have sworn I was cozy. The café customers were mostly tan and wearing dirty construction-work uniforms. Needless to say, I never saw a female customer there. Nor, for that matter, did I see many young people (not counting the brief after-school visits by students), who according to the government’s survey make up the refugees’ largest demographic. In fact, I only saw one young person. (He didn’t want to talk to me, of course.) The customers who came to this café to sleep were divided equally between scruffy guys who appeared to be in their mid-30s and 40s and elderly men in their 50s and 60s. Had the transient kids the government based their findings on come and gone? This brings us to the strange case of the government’s forthcoming program. For the purposes of their study, they called up every internet café in the country and asked them to cite the average number of all-night customers, and then furthermore the heavy users among them who sleep in their cafés on at least half the nights of a week. The fact that everything is based on the café owner’s memory makes the data untrustworthy, and it’s impossible to tell exactly how reliable any of the figures cited in the study are. (Oh, they also left questionnaires at 146 carefully selected internet cafés for customers to fill out, but how many of these tight-lipped, shame-burdened sad sacks do you think even glanced at those?) Once back in Tokyo, I headed out to the seedy confines of Kabukicho¯ in search of consultants from the Internet Café Refugee Consultation Service who could help me understand the refugee problem and the government’s role in it. I walked for more than an hour during the scheduled patrol times indicated on the service’s website but had no luck. I called their consultation desk the next morning and was told that they had canceled the patrol at 7:30 PM because of an approaching typhoon. I remarked that there had been no rain at all yesterday and was told, “It was probably determined by the staff that was on-site last night. This patrol is indeed an outreach program to find and talk to potential internet-café refugees, but rather than walking around to find us on patrol, I think you’d be better off making a reservation by phone for a consultation session at our office.” OK, so what’s the point of announcing the patrol on their website if they don’t want people looking for them? “Well, not everybody checks our homepage regularly, you know?” Right. These refugees, who by the government’s own findings are supposed to be young and consumed with the internet, are living at an internet café but not using the internet to track down free money. Makes perfect sense that they’d pick up the phone instead, right? This kind of system-wide incompetence led to the government’s new loan system, which is set to begin during fiscal year 2009. The system offers ¥150,000 per month for accommodation and living expenses for a period of three to six months, on the condition that the receiver attends training at a local Public Employment Security Office. Since trainees with an annual income of less than ¥1.5 million are exempt from repaying the loan, you could say that it’s essentially a benefit package. So, you know, great for them! The government will be dedicating ¥100 million to this incentive. However, only dispatch workers in their mid-30s or younger who regularly sleep in internet cafés are eligible. In other words, the middle-aged and elderly working poor are not covered. And there’s another catch: Since it will cost an average of around ¥700,000 to support one refugee, that would only add up to a total of 200 or so refugees actually benefiting from the ¥100 million budget. That’s only about 27 percent of the 5,400 refugees that the government found in their study—from 2007. I know I just threw a lot of numbers at you there, so let’s say it another way: The Japanese government is trying to put out a raging fire with an eyedropper full of spit, and a lot of homeless Japanese senior laborers are going to spend a lot of time on the internet in 2009.