Down and Out in Tokyo
Somehow, foreigners have a funny image of Tokyo as being homeless-free, crime-free, clean and high-tech, hee, hee. Actually, Toyko is much, much more than that.
HOMELESS IN FOCUS
Filming rough
….Swedish videographer Simon Klose decided to take when he packed his camera and flew to Japan early last year to shoot a documentary about the last thing most Swedes would associate with this affluent and reputedly harmonious nation: homelessness…
…Not to say it was all a chore. There were brighter episodes, for example watching samurai movies with the ex-yakuza in an all-night theater, while an elderly, cross-dressing prostitute serviced a customer a few seats away.
…Klose went to tape the aging carpenter, who went by the nickname Vitamin D, only to find him there, dead….only months earlier inside the candlelit tent where he lived for eight years near Tokyo City Hall, the homeless man had remarked, “This, too, is a life. Until I die.
Photo via my friend MasaMania. The cardboard sign in the picture reads, “I have misterious pure mind and voice and tongue. So I can lure you into funny mood. If I’m given LITTLE money by you, you maybe can make funny memory. The man who bring funny thing to this town is Me. Yes, I am Funny man.”
I have to agree with that, “I am Funny man.” I keep having this vision of myself in Tokyo, the year 2010:
I’m living on the street in a cardboard box next to a vending machine with my PowerBook plugged into the vending machine’s unplugged power socket. It’s not a pretty dream, except for the fact that I’ll be still posting here on the 3Yen.com and being paid in free wireless online access.
- 
