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San'ya Blues: Laboring Life in Contemporary Tokyo by Edward Fowler (Paperback, 1998)

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Over 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 ground, San'ya shows a hidden face of Japan and contradicts the common assumption of economic and social homogeneity. Fowler argues that differences in ethnicity and class, normally suppressed in mainstream Japanese society, are conspicuous in San'ya and similar communities. San'ya's largely middle-aged, male day-laborer population contains many individuals displaced by Japan's economic success, including migrants from village communities, castoffs from restructuring industries, and foreign workers from Korea and China. The neighborhood and its inhabitants serve as an economic buffer zone-they are the last to feel the effects of a boom and the first to feel a recession. They come alive in this book, telling urgent stories that personify such abstractions as the costs of modernization and the meaning of physical labor in postindustrial society.

Product Identifiers

Publisher
Cornell University Press
ISBN-13
9780801485701
eBay Product ID (ePID)
96574278

Product Key Features

Subject Area
Social Work, Urban Planning
Author
Edward Fowler
Publication Name
San'ya Blues: Laboring Life in Contemporary Tokyo
Format
Paperback
Language
English
Subject
Anthropology, History
Publication Year
1998
Type
Textbook
Number of Pages
288 Pages

Dimensions

Item Height
229mm
Item Width
152mm

Additional Product Features

Title_Author
Edward Fowler
Country/Region of Manufacture
United States

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San'ya Blues: Laboring Life in Contemporary Tokyo by Edward Fowler (Paperback, 1998)

About this product

Product Information

Product Identifiers

Product Key Features

Dimensions

Additional Product Features

Best Selling in School Textbooks & Study Guides

Tracks, Scats and Other Traces: Reissue by Barbara Triggs (Paperback, 2004)

Self-Made Man: My Year Disguised as a Man by Norah Vincent (Paperback, 2006)

Save on School Textbooks & Study Guides

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Viktor Schauberger The Water Wizard (Paperback)

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