5 DISINTEGRATION

Every Man for Himself

Of these sporadic presences and absences, Kentarō noted gleefully that “this is really a fun town.” Preferring that everyone came and went “as they liked” (jibun katte), the veteran construction worker disliked the group affiliation that Suzuki had cultivated among the workers. He had long wanted to restore the individualizing law of the market in which the “free worker,” as Marx put it, is compelled to sell their living labor power, and much as Kentarō himself tried to destroy the notion that individual workers belonged to any group, what he was witnessing in the gradual disintegration of the group owed to market forces.¹ Work had gone scarce, and this scarcity not only splintered the group but interrupted the largesse that had sustained its sociality. There had always been borrowing, but now there was also intense bitterness. Only one person embodied the selflessness necessary to counter the individualizing violence of the market, but Takeda-san’s place within the Okinawa-gang had been grounded in work, and the group itself had lost its cohesiveness. Takeda-san now worked elsewhere, as did Saruma and Riku. Suzuki had also kept the subcontractors with whom he had established connections on his own, and more importantly, there simply was not much work.

While Kentarō celebrated the fact that everyone was going their own way, the sociality of the group had been sacrificed, and this disempowered the guys. It meant that they had to fend for themselves and that they would no longer be sustained by the recognition of their buddies. Even people outside the Okinawa-gang were saying that the group was not its former self. It used to be that the group had a reputation in San’ya, be it with the police or general acquaintances, and it was the self-assurance that derived from this knowledge that enabled the guys to reverse the shaming gaze of general society. But the group no longer presented a united front of solidarity. Gatherings at Takeda-san’s apartment had become infrequent, and the guys no longer convened to drink and gamble on Sundays. Everyone, as Akira put it, had “split up.”

Implicit in the market violence of “every man for himself,” the final outcome of such social atomization was everywhere evident in San’ya. While its bunkhouses enjoyed full occupancy, its streets were empty, because the aging denizens of San’ya had retreated into their rooms.² They thus constituted what Marx described as “an immense mass” of serialized, now-defunct productive units, between whom lateral recognition had been obstructed.³ Moreover, they had exchanged their lives in return for wages. Nearly every day, an ambulance could be seen in front of a bunkhouse, carting someone away, and one day, a man was found dead on the street beside Sanyukai. Social atomization heralded a solitary death.

To be sure, for many welfare recipients in San’ya, social connectivity had become limited to contact with state representatives. Having no recourse but welfare, they were dependent on the state for their livelihood and consequently gave themselves to be recognized as such. Manifested in encounters with doctors or ward officers, state power was therefore intimately intertwined with death. In having no choice but to submit to its gaze, the state emerged as the preeminent institution before which the men of San’ya were made to experience failure and insufficiency. It possessed the power to reduce individuals to a condition of abjection, predisposing them to be incorporated into the fold of its docile subjects. Indeed, it was only in moments of complete helplessness that fiercely independent individuals, like Riku or Suzuki, submitted themselves to the care of the state. On the one hand, their lives were at stake in these moments. On the other, the state exploited the opportunity to ensure that they remained in its thrall, which had become indistinguishable from death itself.

As I was to learn, certain regulations ensured that, for many welfare recipients, even death would remain a solitary one, administered by the state. When Akira’s health had deteriorated to the point at which anything could happen, the two of us asked his ward officer to register the contact information of a friend in San’ya. We were rebuffed. In the event of death, we were told, the ward would send a letter to an address listed in Akira’s family registry. They could put a phone number on record, too, but this phone number had to belong to a family member whose name was recorded in the family registry.⁴ Instead of lying, we said that Akira had severed his relationship with these family members decades ago, but it was to no avail.

While such powerlessness reinvigorated assertions of masculinity in San’ya, it also entailed that the guys had to master the art of shamelessness. At some point, everyone would need welfare, and the shame of this had to be rendered palatable by displacing it with the shameless performance of helplessness. The initial shame had to be quenched, pushed aside, and replaced by an enactment that secured welfare. Thus, if Akira said an otoko had to know “shame” (haji), this statement meant something altogether different from having to know shame before the state or society at large. In fact, what it meant was that an otoko determined the conditions under which he experienced shame and that he rebuffed unsolicited shame. For this was a statement of allegiance. Famously explicated by Ruth Benedict, Akira was using a traditionalist term for shame—haji—which invoked the entire set of values espoused by the group within San’ya.⁵ It resonated with the yakuza terminology that the guys used to express relations of seniority, be it “blood brother” (kyōdaibun) or “underling” (shatei), and with the virtues of having a sense of “indebtedness” (on) or giri-ninjō, a combination of giri and ninjō, the former of which loosely translates as “duty” or “obligation” and the latter as “human feeling” or “human sympathy.”⁶ In this fashion, Akira carried about a traditional Japanese sensu (fan), Riku wore geta (clogs), and Takeda-san was described as a “man of legend,” as if this portrayal made no reference to the 1983 yakuza movie.⁷ Bamboozling the state was forgiven by this transgressive code of conduct, which ultimately sought to reference a social entity that transcended individual life, enabling the laborer to sacrifice himself for the longevity of the group. It was in accordance with these values that a real otoko aspired out of a sense of “shame” (haji), for they staved off the stigma of failure and ensured that his life would not have been in vain, but still, the shaming gaze of the state was well-nigh inescapable. Indeed, it was because there was shame that it had to be negated with shamelessness, and as the guys aged, this dialectic shifted definitively in favor of the state. In the final analysis, they would be dependent on the state for their livelihood, and much as they differentiated themselves from the men outside Sanyukai, they were caught in a relationship to the state that was analogous to that shameful place of sitting. The very prospect of waiting for a meal might have appeared so shameful to them that one would have to be shameless to do so, but everyone in the group knew and exchanged information on how to become a welfare recipient: what to say, what not to say, and how to act.⁸ It had become a veritable technique of survival, and for this reason, there was no mistaking that the guys became truly submissive when they were desperate. Alongside death, the state was always on the horizon, limiting their references to the vanishing virtues of a criminal underworld.

But much as the state gaze threatened masculinity, it was also constitutive of it. The group required an external entity that acknowledged their transgressive character, and at least at first, this was also the capacity in which I was incorporated into the group, with wariness and a standoffish desire to be recognized on their own terms. There was an obsessive object of identification at stake in the enactment of vanishing mobster values, caught up in the state and foreign researcher to whom it gave itself to be seen.⁹ One late night, I found myself with Kentarō at a snack bar where, with a senior hostess nodding solemnly by his side, he asserted that it was “impossible” for me to “understand” the intricacies of being Japanese. Knowledge thereof belonged exclusively to insiders and, in this case, to insiders to San’ya. I nodded along, but then Kentarō told me to send him my writing and to ask him if I had any questions. I responded honestly that I did not, and this was true, because I had decided earlier that I would not compromise my relationship with the guys in the name of “research.” Besides, if I had questions, I would ask Akira, whom everyone accepted as my confidant. With this, Kentarō smiled briefly, and the matter was never mentioned again. In any case, it would have been impossible for me to send him my writings, which were in English, but it was also precisely this foreign, teratological quality of writing that manifested a gaze that was at once threatening—“understanding,” not to mention translation, was impossible, as I would get it all wrong—and constitutive, because it was only in the gaze of the Other that the transgressive (in relation to state norms) and Japanese (in relation to the West) quality of giri-ninjō derived its value. It was in the gaze of such Others that the group’s disintegration had caused it to lose social currency, disempowering its old members. Under Kentarō’s leadership, even work had ceased to operate as a unifying force.

After deposing Suzuki as tehaishi, Kentarō had successfully disbanded the core workers of the Okinawa-gang. Saying that he was tired of people who “cannot uphold obligations,” he had gotten rid of workers that Suzuki had cherished. After all their complaints and, worst of all, failures to show for work, Kentarō declared that he didn’t need them! In this way, the twenty-eight-year-old Wakami had to find alternative sources of work, despite being the most versatile and energetic worker. After a verbal fight, Kentarō had even vowed never to send Saruma (his cousin) to work, prompting Takeda-san to mediate and ask that they “get along.” Takeda-san had himself decided to seek work as a scaffolder through another acquaintance, although Kentarō still called Nē-san with work, and Takeda-san did sometimes go. Over time, the number of workers Kentarō could count on had dwindled, and while work continued to trickle in, the quota of workers from the subcontractor company Tenjima had also diminished. In midsummer, Kentarō had difficulty filling a quota of five. Even worse, he himself would fail to show for work, which he justified by saying that he was “purposely leaving a hole.” Supposedly, it was his “strong point” to “do it to perfection” the next day, giving no one an excuse to complain.

Another sign of social disintegration lay in the near failure of the monthly meetings of the mujin kō, otherwise known in English as a rotating savings and credit association (ROSCA), or as a pooling club.¹⁰ This club consisted of once-per-month gatherings in which members contributed ¥10,000 ($100) toward a sum that one individual took home. It ideally consisted of twelve members so that meetings could continue for twelve months and so that one person pocketed ¥120,000 on each occasion.¹¹ Everyone used this money for expenses that their regular income did not permit. Akira, Kentarō, and Shōkawa would use the money to end their debts at Sakura. Saruma and Suzuki would travel to Okinawa. Such expenditures were luxurious, and the pooling club posited the group as the source of this largesse. Just as Takeda-san and Nē-san transformed the money form into hospitality, the club produced the illusion of surplus in the absence of labor, and it was the solidarity of buddies that produced this excess.¹² The club functioned at once as an affirmation and test of group solidarity. On the one hand, it took the form of a celebration. Everyone met to wine and dine at a certain venue, and speeches and toasts were even given. On the other hand, the club never worked as it was intended to. There might be logistical hiccups, like agreeing on a time, date, and place. But the real problems began when its social obligations strained personal relations. Rather than establishing the sociality of the group as the source of wealth, the pooling club then caused money to come between everyone. If one person failed to contribute, it could lead the group to fracture. In this sense, the pooling club was akin to the shared pile of money that could be found on the table at Sakura on Sundays, except that the rules of the club were formalized. On Sundays, one did not necessarily have to give, but this was not an option in the club.

The first time the Okinawa-gang undertook a pooling club, it lasted a month. After a sumptuous feast at Hikari-sushi, Saruma pocketed the first installment of money and flew to Okinawa. But Saruma himself would later object to the composition of the club, because back in the heyday of the Okinawa-gang, this club had expanded to include characters like Yamamori and Matsuda, with whom Saruma did not want to take part. Finally, the frustrated organizer of the club, Suzuki, had to end it, exclaiming that Saruma and others “should have said so to begin with.”¹³

Two years later, similar conflicts arose when Saruma insisted on doing the pooling club at a venue like Hikari-sushi, while others said this was too extravagant (indeed, dinner for one cost ¥3,000) and that it was better to meet somewhere informal. But Saruma objected to this setup and refused to take part. Thus, the club was “messed up” from the get-go. The solidarity of its members had been compromised and, to make matters worse, by someone who, it was rumored, had not returned the cash he had received two years earlier. Moreover, whereas two years earlier, it had been the sheer excess of participants that had caused failure, the 2014 club was plagued by a shortage of members. Having difficulty coming up with ¥10,000, some individuals dropped out along the way. As Shōkawa put it, such individuals were not buddies, for it should have been altogether possible to come up with ¥10,000. Moreover, realizing that the club was “in trouble” (yabai), Nē-san had even asked to take her turn as soon as possible, that is, before others jumped boat. Because returns would diminish as the year progressed, the unreliability of members jeopardized investments that everyone had already made.

In its inevitable shortcomings, the pooling club formalized the unspoken contractual relationships that sustained the viability of the working group, and in so doing, it replaced labor with the mutual generosity of its members. But where Suzuki had been forgiving, Kentarō’s intransigence had caused the number of working individuals to dwindle to five. Core members of the Okinawa-gang, like Rikiishi or Norihisa, were also not participating, and Saruma had cursed the entire venture. In addition, two members had already dropped out. As if of gambling, it was said that those who remained were “certain” to stick it out. But to avert further contingencies, it was decided that the money be collected at the beginning of every month when everyone had come into funds. Moreover, there was to be no celebration, as the money was to be dropped off at Kentarō’s and handed on. As a result, the club had been stripped of its social aspect. It had devolved into a pecuniary function in which participants did not meet face-to-face.

In the spirit of this fractured club, the petty disagreements that divided former members of the Okinawa-gang invariably involved money. Akira resented Shōkawa because, when Akira had been asked to write an emergency phone number at the hospital, he had used Shōkawa’s. Upon learning this, Shōkawa gave Akira a verbal thrashing, saying that Akira should have discussed the matter with him beforehand. If they had been in the yakuza together, Shōkawa’s response would have been quite unforgivable, Akira said, for the two of them had done time in the joint together, and Akira had come to Shōkawa’s rescue. Yet the fact of the matter was that they were not in the yakuza. There were no formal obligations between buddies, which at once endowed their relations with a genuine character but also meant that things could easily fall apart. In this instance, referencing yakuza tropes was moot. If Shōkawa was afraid of shouldering a funeral bill, nothing could be done. Indeed, money was causing everyone to default on their social obligations and reputations. Saruma was repeatedly criticized for failing to return the money from the last club. Suzuki was said to be stealing money when no one was looking, and gambling was now taking place in which individuals would “take money from each other,” that is, “among buddies.”

It was only in Takeda-san and Nē-san’s home that money was distilled into hospitality for everyone, including those who had fallen into disrepute. At Kentarō’s place, on the other hand, it was a market logic that prevailed, in which bad performers were disinvited. Individuals brought their own goods, and participation was conditional upon the observance of a standard of conduct. This was contractual, and those who failed were “out.” Yet, as Kentarō himself would experience when he almost died, Takeda-san and Nē-san’s hospitality compensated for the failures that nearly every San’ya resident would undergo. In all its self-destructive force, the transgressive lifestyle of San’ya invariably led individuals to ruin themselves, and this was particularly the case when the individualizing logic of the market caused egotism to rear its head.

Just as everyone could remember when San’ya had been a booming town of day laborers, it was possible to witness the rapid boom and bust of its denizens. Although this rise and fall of workers was grounded in manual labor as a process of surplus extraction, there appeared to be two ways in which men ruined their accountability. One was to resent their lot and grumble, which was brought about by penury. The other was to become bloated with money and to bankrupt oneself. The first of these led the guys to borrow without returning or to complain about work. Saruma, for one, had fallen into disfavor because he was too fastidious in his demands and criticized too much. The insistent ways of the former company boss did “not agree with” San’ya, and much as Saruma complained with good intentions, his voice assumed a self-righteous tone that did not sit well with Kentarō or the rest of the group. In short, he was “a pain.” Then there was Hayashi, who complained left and right about the quality of work Matsuda sent his way and repeatedly failed to show up. Rumor of Hayashi’s inconstancy spread like a virus, and he quickly became a person to be shunned. But Hayashi eventually made up with Matsuda. After a final spat in a dive, Hayashi took his glasses off and raised his head for Matsuda to slap him across the face. With this, the two were said to have “made up,” and one year later, Hayashi was living with his most severe critic, Kentarō.

Another year later, Hayashi was found dead in his room. If anything, his death testified to the utterly self-destructive violence with which the group imbibed, as if they had internalized the negative social evaluation of them by society. In fact, Hayashi had been shooting meth throughout my time in San’ya and had even been carted off in an ambulance after fainting in his room. As for Akira, he too was in and out of the hospital, carried off in an ambulance twice or thrice per year, and took to drinking suicidal amounts of alcohol after I left. But his self-destructive lifestyle never seemed to cause disrepute.

It was when excessive consumption combined with egotism that self-destruction engulfed a person in the entirety of their bodily and social aspects. Sufficient funds were necessary for such self-destruction to take place, and unless the person started borrowing, it was therefore the tehaishi who bankrupted himself in this manner. Matsuda had fled San’ya thus, and only one year after his takeover, Kentarō was showing signs of waning as tehaishi. Despite his income, the role of holding workers accountable had grown tiresome for Kentarō, the veteran worker, and he spoke of quitting. But the truth was that, like Suzuki before him, Kentarō had ceased going to work and was living (or drinking) solely off his income as tehaishi. Saruma criticized Kentarō for this, as he had Suzuki, insisting that no one would “follow” (tsuiteiku) Kentarō the way he was carrying on. Drinking too much to go to work, Kentarō risked holding others accountable to standards that he himself would not observe. Meanwhile, Suzuki was waiting in the wings for Kentarō’s subcontractors to return, although this was unlikely to happen, since Suzuki was also in a bad state, drinking more than ever. But if it did happen, all the subcontractors would once again be united under one tehaishi. So given to expanding his domain, it was when Suzuki was deposed as tehaishi that the unity of the group had begun to fracture. Without an excess of work, there could be no generosity among members.

Delirium Tremens

Things unraveled slowly but definitively for the tehaishi, Suzuki. It all started when he stopped going to work. At first, he had worked while doing the tehai, but as demands intensified, this became impossible. He dedicated himself solely to doing the tehai, which was a daunting task especially in the first year, but he continued to see everyone in the mornings. After this first year, however, Suzuki stopped getting up unless it was necessary. His day started at three or four in the afternoon with a shochu with ice and water at Mutō’s, and as time progressed, Suzuki gradually acquired a negative reputation. Saruma cautioned him that he was “drinking too much.” Suzuki never once made the effort to go to work, even when his presence would have completed the quota. No doubt, Suzuki knew that his deteriorating physical condition would have made a fool of him at work. Yet the effort would surely have been recognized, since it increasingly seemed like Suzuki was making others work for him. By the time Suzuki started his tehai, he was now already drunk, and undeniably so by the time workers trickled back to Sakura or Mutō’s. Worst of all, workers peripheral to the Okinawa-gang were complaining of Suzuki’s conduct. They would say that, having been sent consecutive days to sites more than an hour and half away, they had asked Suzuki where work would be the following day, expressly stating that they did not wish to go far (a reasonable request). Their livelihood hinged on time to rest after work and on the reduction of transportation costs. But Suzuki only responded that it would be “OK” and to be at the station at six o’clock. When they got to the station next morning, their fears were confirmed, for Suzuki had ignored their requests. In this manner, Suzuki’s attitude became impudent—“Just go to work!”—as he expected individuals to work, no questions asked. Suzuki had grown “arrogant” and worse. Witnessing the turn of events, the no-nonsense Riku had altogether stopped working for Suzuki. Even Takeda-san expressed consternation over Suzuki’s unbecoming conduct as the boss (oyabun) of twenty-five workers, showing up for the New Year’s party with a hickey on his neck and doodles on his forehead, drawn by his girlfriend. “It doesn’t look good,” Shōkawa said, turning to Kentarō to ask why he did not act: “It’s your younger brother, right?” But matters were worse than they seemed, for Suzuki was failing to pay workers. It had happened repeatedly that, on exiting Sakura with an envelope, workers had been cut short by a couple thousand yen. Every day, Suzuki was slipping himself some more drinking money from less influential workers, and he had become a terrible spendthrift, bandying about his money. Cash had become the sign of his power.

Suzuki’s denouement came one day when everyone, back from work, was calling him about work the following day. Suzuki was not picking up. Nor had he picked up when Barasawa, the Tenjima company’s middleman, had called him to convey the quota. Instead, Kentarō had received a call from Barasawa, and it was swiftly decided that the tehai would be completed in Suzuki’s absence. Half an hour after the tehai had been settled, Suzuki burst through the doors of Sakura, his face as white as a sheet. Discomfited by comments—“Your face is white, are you OK?”—it took him a moment to realize that the tehai had been concluded. Within a week of this occurrence, Kentarō had spoken to Barasawa and fired Suzuki.

Fallen from his high horse and shunned by the majority of the group, this was not yet Suzuki’s lowest point. He still did tehai for his own subcontractors, although this was insufficient to cover his expenses, and he hung out with the equally unpopular Hayashi. But he had realized that he had a drinking problem and had started going for walks in the early afternoons. Thus, he could be seen walking alone along the Sumida River.

One day, Suzuki was discovered passed out on the street:

The first thing Akira said was that Suzuki had been taken to the hospital in an ambulance. Apparently, he had gone to Sanyukai by himself in the morning but had been turned back because there was no doctor there that morning. Abe-san and Hasegawa later found Suzuki on the street by Mutō’s place and called an ambulance. Kentarō had also called Akira to ask whether Sanyukai could not do something. At the time, it still was not clear what had happened to Suzuki at the hospital, but I do distinctly remember Akira saying: “This is how people from Okinawa die.”

After lunch, Akira and I headed out to Iroha because Kentarō said he’d be there. Kentarō himself was playing Oicho-Kabu on the cardboard by the entrance to Iroha arcade. Inside Sakura, Shōkawa was drunk and Hasegawa was talking about the morning. Kentarō was outside.… I had to head off to an interview, but before I went, I spoke to Kentarō. At first, when I said I’d go to see Suzuki, he said it’d be “better not to go,” but when I insisted that this had to be the chance to have Suzuki hospitalized and well, he put his hands together and said “please” and, if possible, to have Suzuki hospitalized for a month or two. He did also say that “when this kind of thing happens, I get worried too.”

When I got back from the interview, and in spite of the fact that Abe-san and Hasegawa had gone to the hospital—ostensibly to ensure Suzuki was hospitalized, Suzuki had been turned away and had to walk home from the hospital by himself … he had gotten back and was upstairs on the second floor of Mutō’s. Everyone was downstairs drinking out front—quite a crowd, because it was one of the first sunny days of the year: Kentarō, Shōkawa, Norihisa, Norihisa’s “junior” Naota, and the list just continued. The first thing Kentarō said to me when I got there was to go upstairs and talk to Suzuki. Well, as usual, when Kentarō says “talk,” he means to go and “give him a real talking to.”

When I got upstairs, Suzuki was lying there sweating and shaking all over. He even had trouble talking, with his lips shaking. He was half-awake, half-asleep.… I tried to convince him that we should call an ambulance again, but Suzuki just kept saying that he was tired and wanted to sleep. People were coming in and out of the room … Rikiishi and others. Downstairs, outside, it was chaos with the guys drinking. Hasegawa, indecisive and full of himself as usual, saying that they were thinking of various schemes to take care of Suzuki.

I went to Sanyukai—Guy-san giving me a weird look like: “What the hell are you doing here?”—to ask if they’d see Suzuki the next morning. I explained the situation. Guy-san said that the only way Suzuki could get hospitalized would be if he were unconscious. He also said that they could see Suzuki in the morning, but that they would not call an ambulance.¹⁴

I went back to Mutō’s. Kentarō was actually quite emotional, turning away from everyone and crying. He’d say, “Thank you, thank you,” and shaking our/my hands. Shifting in and out of crying, turning away, his face puffed up and red. Then, he’d turn back and drink.… At one point, this new nerdy-looking guy with glasses started talking shit to Hasegawa, who was sitting right across from Kentarō. (There must have been around fifteen people sitting outside at this point.) The guy with glasses shouted: “You, you’ve been arrogant from way back” (Omae, mukashi kara erasō ni!) Then Kentarō stepped in between saying not to address Hasegawa as: “ ‘You,’ don’t say ‘you’! He’s your senior, right?!” (‘Omae,’ ‘omae’ wa nai daro! Meue desho?!).¹⁵ Since the guy wouldn’t back down, Kentarō said, “Fine, let’s take it around the corner.” Kentarō then got up, took practicing swings at people, and moved around like he was in a boxing ring. Laughing and saying: “Here we go, it’s been a while since I really fought.” I remarked that Kentarō always defuses situations by challenging to a fight, and Kentarō responded, laughingly saying that “it’s because I beat the hell out of them.” Sure enough, Kentarō went around the corner to wait for the guy … and while he was there, the younger guy changed his mind and said he was just going to go over and shake Kentarō’s hand. All of a sudden, he was docile, like clay in Kentarō’s hands. And Kentarō started to introduce him to everyone. The younger man bowed his head to us all and clinked glasses.

While this whole show was going down, Saruma arrived. We’d been trying to get in touch with Saruma all day, but he’d forgotten his cell phone at Hasegawa’s place the night before. I told him what had happened—with him saying “no way”—and we headed upstairs. Mijime was there with Abe-san in the room adjoining Suzuki’s. It turned out that Shirahige hospital, where Suzuki was sent that morning, was the worst. In fact, Akira had said it’s the hospital where you are a living “human experiment,” and “I told you so,” when Suzuki had been turned away in the morning. Mijime was actually quite knowledgeable about things, saying that from his experience it’d be best if Suzuki drank weak mizuwari throughout the night, rather than stop/cut liquor completely. While he spoke, Saruma and I decided that we should take Suzuki to the hospital right away. We called an ambulance and told Suzuki to keep his eyes closed as if he were unconscious. Suzuki told us that he wouldn’t be able to “act.” When the ambulance folks came upstairs, Shōkawa was just getting in the way, drunk on the second floor, as if he’d just come upstairs to have a look. Saruma got pissed at him. In fact, there were so many people, especially downstairs, hanging around and approaching me, Saruma, and Suzuki. As for us, we were trying to clear space for Suzuki and to get rid of the “smell of alcohol.” It was like everyone was approaching us. Or me. We’d decided in a matter-of-fact way that it would be Saruma and me who would take Suzuki to the hospital. So Akira was like “please” to me, and Norihisa came up repeatedly, bowing, worried, and saying, “Please take care of Suzuki.” I felt pressure, with others, too, bequeathing Suzuki into my hands. Even Riku, sitting solitary at a short distance, waved me over to say it was OK that Saruma was going with me to the hospital, but that if Kentarō came back in time, to go with Kentarō instead. I.e., to go with the real brother instead; it somehow being implicit that I go instead of Saruma. Notably, Kentarō disappeared somewhere the moment Suzuki was being carried downstairs. I only saw him when Saruma and I—discussing how to keep it a secret that Suzuki had been taken to hospital in the morning and how to avoid Shirahige hospital—were waiting for the ambulance staff to get in touch with a hospital, while checking Suzuki’s vital signs. Riku almost forcibly dragged Kentarō to the ambulance, where Kentarō pulled away. Two policemen had come over at this time to check on what was going on, taking a peek in the ambulance to see who was there. When they’d crossed the street, on the way back to the Mammoth, I saw Kentarō running across the street and accosting the policemen from across the rails, as if shouting at them.

Saruma and I tried to convince the ambulance staff not to take us to Shirahige hospital, but because Suzuki was unconscious—i.e., not opening his eyes—they were scared it could have been something with his brain, and Shirahige was the only place that could treat that. We decided that there was nothing to do about it and headed back to the hospital where Suzuki had been turned away in the morning. It was around five o’clock at this time. It would take us another six hours to get Suzuki hospitalized.

We arrived at Shirahige hospital and Suzuki was taken through the regular tests. We were shut out of the room Suzuki was in. (Later, when we went to see Suzuki at the mental hospital, he told us he’d been lying there visibly with pain in his chest, breathing real hard, and the nurses had acted like they hadn’t noticed; how it scared him.) At one point, though, I saw him through the open door, and I went inside. Suzuki was there sweating—pretty much abandoned by the nurses and doctor, who were elsewhere—with pain in his chest. He smelled, because he hadn’t washed. Getting the chills. Breaking out in sweat. He was in a panic, though, saying to me: “Not here. Here is impossible.” Also putting his fingers together to say that he’d been told to pay ¥60,000, to get the money now. He wanted to go home and I got worried. I asked the nurse if someone had told him to pay, and she immediately said no. I didn’t realize at the time how scared Suzuki had gotten by the way they ignored him. I also did not know that Suzuki was hallucinating at the time. He had, in fact, been hallucinating from the beginning of this year. On the way to the hospital, Saruma had held Suzuki’s hand, and Suzuki had refused to let go. (In the hospital itself, the doctor recorded that Suzuki had been seeing things and saying that “there’s a cockroach on the wall” when there was none).

Saruma came inside, too, and told Suzuki not to worry about ridiculous things like money. The doctor came over. I flipped out and said it was ridiculous that someone in this state would be turned away. The doctor got angry at me, in turn, saying there was no right for me to speak to him like that. He said he’d stop the examination of Suzuki if I didn’t leave the room. (By this time, it had leaked that Suzuki had been at the hospital in the morning. “Did you know he was here this morning?” the nurse said, to which Saruma and I said, “No, we didn’t,” concocting a story, pushing responsibility onto the establishment for having turned away Suzuki in the first place.) At least, this is what I presume Saruma continued to do, because I got kicked out of the room. For a short while, I could hear Saruma talking to the doctor inside. When Saruma came back, he told me that it had been decided that the doctor/ambulance staff contact a psychiatric hospital because Shirahige hospital was not able to treat the issues that Suzuki was dealing with, i.e., the hallucinations and coming off alcohol. It took us at least another two hours before the next hospital was decided: the crazy long wait, of which the ambulance staff had warned us, before we actually headed out with Suzuki in the back. Crazy long wait. When they finally did find a hospital, the ambulance staff came back to us and suggested that, perhaps—with Suzuki himself hinting that he wanted to go home—it would be better to take Suzuki home, watch over him for the night, and go to a mental clinic. My interpretation of the ambulance staff saying this was that the mental hospital itself had suggested this. Indeed, the ambulance staff themselves said that this was the case. But Saruma started to flip out, saying: “It’s all about money!!”—holding his thumb to forefinger to signify money. Before that, the ambulance staff had asked him repeatedly if Suzuki had his insurance card. Saruma had also been on the phone with the mental hospital and had been asked—as the cousin—to bring ¥100,000 that very evening. Another big issue was whether or not the older brother could come along.

Finally, it was decided that we go. Much to Saruma’s consternation, however, it was not a given that Suzuki be hospitalized at the other end. But they had agreed to at least see Suzuki. So Saruma headed back to San’ya, to get Suzuki’s insurance card and to get Kentarō, who had agreed to come but was passed out, sleeping in Sakura when Saruma got there. They drove from San’ya to the mental hospital in Nishi-Arai. I stayed with Suzuki in the ambulance.

After the ride to the mental hospital in Nishi-Arai, we finally arrived. We entered the hospital through the back entrance.… Everything was dark and it took a while before the staff on the inside opened the door. It was an intimidating building, from the inside too, with imposing walls and locks on every door. You definitely got the feel that you were locked in and couldn’t get out unless someone brought a key along. We were introduced into a small room, and I was told that I could sit next to Suzuki. I went about assuring the nurse on duty that we were bringing along the insurance card and that the older brother was also coming.

The doctor finally came. Young man, in his mid-thirties. I immediately got a bad vibe/feeling from this person.… He wasn’t making eye contact with either Suzuki or myself. Looking down and to the side, as if to say we weren’t even worthy of his attention—that he was condescending to speak to us: a pain—he asked standard questions like when the last time Suzuki had had any alcohol. I think he asked questions for about three minutes max. He was real hesitant about writing, as well—half-assed—scribbling and crossing his letters out, looking down at the paper as if it was a distraction from us, something to keep from looking at us. He kept doing this even after I shouted at / criticized him … because after three minutes of asking questions and muttering condescendingly to me—“What, you’re just a friend”—he suggested that we go home with medication. I flipped out, saying that he’d only spoken to Suzuki for three minutes when we’d spent twelve hours arriving—there was a wince in the room when I said this, from the nurse and the ambulance staff member—and to please wait until the older brother came. The doctor said he could wait ten minutes. It was ridiculous. I said it was “ridiculous” that the doctor would decide based on three minutes. That he was “responsible” for Suzuki—who, one in a million, could die if he didn’t receive care from going off the liquor—and that it was “ridiculous” to say that they would send Suzuki home with medication “so that would not happen.” I.e., so he would not die from withdrawal. There was another wince from the people in the room. (In fact, Suzuki’s intravenous therapy was changed three times that night.)¹⁶

I have to say, though, that I’ve never seen Suzuki as docile as he was that night. The doctor also had the audacity to say early on that even if Suzuki was hospitalized, he didn’t know if Suzuki would stop drinking anyway (so what was the point of hospitalization?). I asked the doctor whether it wasn’t proper to ask—normal, as a psychologist—about Suzuki’s family situation etc., and he returned arrogantly, addressing me with a supercilious “you” (anata) and insisting that I was asking this and that to no purpose.¹⁷ I responded by saying that I was just asking and that, surely, they would inquire about such family matters henceforth, and: “Please.” For an instant, the doctor seemed ashamed, to be conscious of himself … and while we waited, a ridiculous situation ensued in which there was just silence, the doctor scribbling and crossing out to avoid dialogue … when he could have used the fifteen minutes we waited for Kentarō to arrive to talk to Suzuki. So I asked Suzuki questions instead and whether he himself wanted to say something. He said, “Not particularly.” As for the doctor, he said he already knew all that stuff, i.e., because he had read the report from the other hospital. He also asked Suzuki “himself” what he wanted, and Suzuki said he “wanted to be hospitalized.”

Finally, the doctor seemed to break, noting that Suzuki’s liver readings were quite high and that it might be an idea to have him stay one night, have the family come in next morning, and have the doctor the next day make the decision. I felt relief at this, because it meant it’d be OK if Kentarō didn’t show up in time. I kept calling Saruma and Kentarō, telling them to come right away, rather than buy stuff at the convenience store. They finally arrived, Kentarō smelling heavily of liquor, going straight to the table beside Suzuki—telling me to shut up because he wanted to hear what the doctor had to say!—and answering questions. The main question being whether there were other siblings, family members. And finally, the verdict: given that Suzuki’s been drinking a little—“for three years!” I interjected, only to be shut up by Kentarō!—the plan was to have Suzuki hospitalized a week (the amount of time it would take for the symptoms to go away).

Hard as it was for him, Kentarō massaged Suzuki’s shoulders and sent him off.

After they took Suzuki away, Kentarō started to flirt with the two nurses in the room. One was real big … but she smiled and said, “Ugh, it really stinks of liquor,” when Kentarō asked, “Whoa, how do you get so big?!” and jokingly butted stomachs with her. And to the other petite nurse, Kentarō said—while she smiled and laughed—“What are you doing here with the body of an elementary school kid?”

We drove back, stopping off at a convenience store to get beer—Kentarō getting a Smirnoff Ice—and finished off the night drinking on the second floor of Hasegawa’s place, above Mutō’s. Kentarō even tried to convince me to go to work the next day instead of him. I declined.¹⁸

Suzuki was discharged from the hospital ten days later. His hallucinations had ceased, as they turned out to have been alcohol induced, and he had been altogether weaned off alcohol. Saruma and Kentarō had assumed responsibility for collecting money for the hospital bill, which exceeded ¥100,000 ($1,000). Everyone Suzuki had once sent to work was approached, and if they provided funds, their names were written down next to the amount they had given. The plan was to force Suzuki to face up to his conduct and the fact of having been a burden to so many. As expected, Takeda-san had Suzuki home after his discharge, simply to check in and see how he was doing, noting in his absence that it might take him one or two years to become his old self. But others were more skeptical. Akira, for one, said that the “environment” in San’ya was “too bad”; there was no way for Suzuki to break free from it. Sure enough, after a couple months of medication, sobriety, and welfare, Suzuki was back to his old self, drinking from dawn till dusk. One day, when Suzuki insisted that his word carried weight in San’ya, Kentarō flat out retorted that someone on welfare had “no trust.”

A year after the fact, Akira would comment on Suzuki’s “all too self-righteous” (jibun katte sugiru) behavior that he had no sense of “indebtedness” (on). Suzuki had been saved by the group, and yet his actions demonstrated that he was unashamed and had no consideration for the others. But what was Suzuki to do? It was not just Suzuki but everyone, according to Akira, that was being self-righteous. This was how everyone got along, complaining about one another in private: so-and-so had not returned money, Shōkawa was fighting, or Saruma was being a loudmouth. Everyone, Kentarō said, “gets along, while grumbling under their breath.” While Suzuki could have apologized for taking things too far, his conduct replicated that of everyone else, and he was understandably loath to get down on his knees. Rather than give in to shame, he rebuffed it, and thus, he became shameless in the eyes of the group.

When masculinity was asserted in moments of evident weakness, however, in the absence of group recognition, it assumed a hollow air, devoid of self-assurance. In such moments, Hayashi, Suzuki, or Saruma became isolated and pathetic figures, having no choice but to insist on their ways. Shunned by everyone, Suzuki’s boasting took on an abject, pitiful air, as did Akira, when he insisted that his suicide attempt would have succeeded if the knife had been sharp. In fact, Akira was living with serious health issues that not only alienated him from the others, who had not been diagnosed with life-threatening illnesses, but that gradually robbed him of the mental and physical certitude necessary to earn the respectability of an intimidating individual. Incessant physical pain, invisible on the outside, led him to drink and to combine crazy amounts of alcohol with painkillers, sleeping pills, and other medication. Eventually, the painkillers would take over.

One day, Akira was informed by doctors that he should expect a brain hemorrhage and that the eventuality of this hemorrhage could not be prevented because his tumor could not be excised. He could only wait for the inevitable rupture that would be recognizable by “incredible pain” and take himself to the hospital when it happened. Chances were that Akira would survive, he was told, but that he would be paralyzed from the waist down. Having learned this earlier in the day, Akira puttered around Mutō’s hole-in-the-wall, drunk, occasionally saying, “I don’t want to live.” He threw up as he rounded the corner to go to his bunkhouse and, later in the evening, stabbed himself in the stomach with a kitchen knife borrowed from a neighbor across the hallway. But the knife was dull. It caught in the fat as Akira tried to slice across his stomach, and then he changed his mind, walked down the stairs, and called an ambulance. Thirty-six hours later, he had been discharged from the hospital. Akira’s suicide attempt was to have been a “pure” (isagiyoi) gesture of slicing his bowels open in traditional style. Rather than reflect that its failure had been fortunate, Akira insisted afterward that the knife had been dull. So too, he kept on drinking, as if the specter of disaster did not exist. “Rather than bend my convictions” (shinnen o mageru yori), Akira said, he preferred to “die early.”

The truth was that everyone was terrified in their weakest moments, and this vulnerability exposed multifarious, humbling wounds. Fearing for his life, Suzuki held tightly to Saruma’s arm in the ambulance and, during his hospitalization, expressed regret at the way he had treated his girlfriend, Ai. For all his talk that he had nothing to do with his brother, Kentarō repeatedly broke into tears while Suzuki was lying helpless upstairs, and while Akira always conveniently forgot about the times when he had been carted off by an ambulance in the throes of death, in the hospital afterward he would admit remorse regarding his severed family relations, his deteriorating health, or his strained interactions with Sanyukai. Immobilized in the hospital, Akira would say that there were “other things” that bothered him. In these moments, the guys were utterly in the hands of the state, and one is therefore reminded of Hegel’s master-slave dialectic, in which the possibility of self-consciousness resides with the slave because they have experienced and lived in the totalizing fear of death. In their helplessness, the guys had been reduced to a condition of pure negativity in which they had to recognize the state, which exercised the power of death over them, but were not recognized in turn. These were moments in which the guys—shuddering and paranoid in the ambulance or having just stabbed himself in the stomach—underwent what Kojève has described as the complete liquidation of support within the subjugated person. It was the apotheosis of the structural condition of existence of “San’ya,” in which it was not only contained in the interest of affirming state authority but negated in this very containment, negated in its negativity so as eradicate every vestige of potentially disruptive insubordination. Yet, as the dialectic entails, the master or state is stuck in a deadlock because they are recognized by an entity that they do not recognize, and hence, the satisfaction of mutual recognition is foreclosed. In his self-identity, the master can only insist on his authority, whereas the laboring slave, who has nothing, has an incentive to overcome his condition from within and, in the process, establishes a novel relationship to himself.¹⁹ He thereby sees himself for what he is, and within the group, the possibility for mutual recognition was indeed present. It goes without saying that, while the guys occasionally reversed the dialectic by imposing themselves on state representatives (figure 5.1), the revolutionary potential of San’ya had passed. San’ya, forced into docility and written out of history, had become a negative legacy of Japan’s “miraculous” postwar economic recovery. Still, as with the fleeting late-night dialogues when the guys expressed desire to see their children, there were confessional moments that were consigned to silence after the fact, as if history had not run its course.

If a strangely silent defeatism descended on the group while Suzuki was lying supine on the floor, it was not simply the specter of death but powerlessness before the state that elicited this reaction. As it turned out, Suzuki would never have been hospitalized at the mental hospital without an insurance card (hokensho). For lack of cash—¥100,000 up front—Suzuki was entirely dependent on state recognition, and it would have been nearly impossible to collect such money in time. Faced with the medical establishment, masculine bravado gave way to resignation before fate, and it was better for a foreign graduate student to take Suzuki to the hospital than it was for the guys. The objective was not even that Suzuki receive good care. It was only that he be admitted to a hospital, and any hospital at that. This was a problem of old in San’ya. It used to be that Sanyukai would call ambulances, only to have the patient dropped off around the corner. Thus, one way of ensuring hospitalization was to act unconscious at a train station in a wealthier ward, like Setagaya-ku, in which persons requiring hospitalization were more likely to be treated. By the same token, it used to be that patients from San’ya were housed in old wooden extensions of hospitals, before these were demolished. It was from prior experience that the guys knew that Suzuki was in serious trouble and that his earlier dismissal from Shirahige Hospital could have resulted in death. They might not have understood the specifics of Suzuki’s condition—alcohol withdrawal syndrome—but they recognized the situation. Akira, in particular, could list endless abuses by the medical establishment, starting with flagrantly wrong prescriptions and the seeming failure by doctors to acknowledge bone fractures that other doctors recognized right away. Without money or state recognition—an insurance card—the group could make no claims on the medical establishment.

It was at the hospital or ward that the guys were reduced to a condition of abjection that rendered them malleable and ready to conform to expectations. There was simply nothing to hang on to when Suzuki was down with delirium tremens or when Akira attempted suicide, and while such moments facilitated admissions of loss and weakness, they also left the guys with no choice but to be recognized in accordance with state demands. Having lost their social moorings, the guys hardly expressed any compunctions about secondary elaborations of subjectivity, such as acting like an otoko or being submissive to the point of humiliation.²⁰ In moments of emergency, the bottom line was that the suffering individual be located within a social discourse that spared them from death, and the only institution that could provide this security was the state. It was thus in their weakest moments that the guys were predisposed to interpellation, and though they knew that their salvation hinged on a gut-wrenching split and sham, this self-presentation had real effects for both the state and its new subject. In giving himself to be recognized as dependent, the suffering individual recognized state authority in turn, and it was this power of state recognition that forestalled backtalk and forced the circulation of violence to remain within San’ya.

But it cannot be emphasized enough that the power and violence of state recognition had always-already been at work in the all-encompassing labor market, whose strictures could not be escaped. It was also for this reason that, from the get-go, the discourse of the otoko manifested an ambivalence that rendered it complicit with statist norms. Indeed, it fervently espoused the foremost demand that the state placed on the laborer—namely, that he labored. Of course, an otoko not only worked but reserved the right to ditch work, and the type of work he did—manual labor—set him apart from other men. It was the “pride” (puraido) and “dignity” (iji) of every San’ya man to survive within the strictures of this labor market, and when someone like Riku lost it, shouting, “You fucking with a Yama person?”—he was making implicit reference to such self-sufficiency. But in embracing “self-responsibility” (jikosekinin), the counterdiscourse of the otoko complied with the demands of the state and replicated the guilt that general society attributed to the men of San’ya. Moreover, two decades had passed since Sōgidan mounted massive riots against the state, and the day laborers of San’ya had grown old. For lack of numbers—“power”—taking issue with the state had become pointless, and the discourse of the otoko had caved into a narrative of economic productivity.

There was an internal tension to this narrative, however, that compelled the reemergence of social forms that restored the qualitative. Whether this assumed the form of fascism or a counterdiscourse, it was precisely insofar as the economy individualized productive units that it produced the desire for a sociality akin to that manifest in buddies, which ultimately sought to reference a social third that overturned the pointlessness of a life exchanged for money and, finally, for death. It was the negativity to which exchange consigned the day laborer that gave the discourse of the otoko its force and his voice the value of truth. The wounds inflicted by the violence of the market were therefore constitutive and ever in danger of being reopened.

Because it stamped their lives with finality, it was most often when a family member passed away that the full force of these wounds was unleashed. For the guys who were remotely in touch with their kin, news of death reached them by phone. Akira learned thus of his older sister passing away, but for lack of money, he chose to remain in San’ya, and he advised Shōkawa to do the same when his mother passed away. The problem was twofold. Flying back to Okinawa required funds that the guys would have to borrow from Sakura, which would take at least one year to return. More significantly, in Akira’s case it was unclear whether his family would welcome him. On the other hand, Shōkawa could muster enough money to pay the fare to Okinawa, but he would have to ask his family to help pay for the return. Rather than suffer the humiliation, not to mention the possibility of being stranded in Okinawa, Akira told Shōkawa not to go.

Shōkawa mourned the passing of his mother in a dive bar off Namidabashi:

The guys, especially Hayashi and Shōkawa, were pretty drunk. Shōkawa and I walking shoulder to shoulder down the street. At some point after we’d gotten to Izumi, and after we’d tried to convince Akira to come to the construction site Friday—he said he was scared after so long, noting the ten-year gap while he had been an “outlaw”—Shōkawa said, “It’s OK to tell him.” At which point, Akira turned to me to say that “Shōkawa’s mother has passed away.” I’m not sure how long it took after that, but at some point briefly afterwards, I noticed Shōkawa tearing. His eyes welling up. I can’t quite describe the sight … this man, now in his late fifties, strongly built with jeans, leather belt, and collared, red short-sleeve shirt … graying, flowing hair with worn face but straight eyes … completely break down in tears. Soon, Hayashi had his arm around the back of Shōkawa, looking away and crying too, his baseball cap backwards on his head along with his glasses strung smartly from the back, the black stud of a plastic earring in his left ear. At some point, even Akira said, “I’m gonna start crying, too,” and started tearing, albeit not like the other two. While Shōkawa was lamenting, mourning with Hayashi’s arm around his back, Akira explained to me the trouble of collecting money for a ticket back to Okinawa. The costs, ¥100,000 or such one way. Apparently, they’d tried to collect … but even if Shōkawa were to go one way, he would have to make his own money in Okinawa to come back. Shōkawa had come to Akira to seek advice, saying that he’d take the one-way ticket, but Akira had advised him against it. Now, it was too late. The funeral ceremony was over. At that very moment. Crying out loud, Shōkawa kept saying things like: “I wanted to see her face and hug her before!” “She is gone from this world!” “Even if I go to Okinawa … there is nothing!” “There is nothing anymore!” “Forgive me, mother, for being such a pathetic son.” “Mama … Mama …” Crying all the while … he asked which direction Okinawa was in, and Akira pointed south, towards the ventilator in the store. Then, Shōkawa got down on his knees, crying, and bowed repeatedly toward that direction, talking to his mother, asking for forgiveness for being such a bad son, and saying he would live “her part” from here on in. He said “it pains me”—not to be able to see and part from his mother in person. Apparently, Shōkawa had not slept for four nights before this … probably in anticipation of his mother’s death. He said the one thing he would not do is “fight” because his mother wouldn’t want him to. It’d be a bad thing to do. “That I won’t do.” He kept saying “thank you” and “sorry” to us, saying that now he’d stop crying. In response to him, the others—both four years younger—said things like: “That’s an otoko’s tears” (otoko no namida) … “from the soul” (tamashī kara), Akira said, of when an otoko really cries.… Hayashi described how he’d been able to meet his father on his deathbed before dying and that he could understand how hard it was for Shōkawa not to be able to meet or see his mother before the actual putting away of her.… Hayashi started crying again at this point, too. Akira saying, “That’s it, cry it out, let him cry it out.” Trying, too, to put a bit of a break on it after Shōkawa had done bowing to his mother, saying, “That’s it, it’s over.” Akira noted how this would go on for a week, because the guys on the corner were being so “nice.” Akira noted, too, how he’d “gone wild” (abareta) in Iroha arcade after his older sister had passed away this year. He told the story of how he hadn’t been able to pay for the ticket, how he’d called his brother … and been told to “take care of his own stuff, as in, they would take care of things in Okinawa.” There’s “nothing you can do.” Shōkawa said this today, too: “Nothing I can do.”

Meanwhile, a phone call came from Suzuki because Rikiishi was seemingly going at it … in a fighting, trouble-making mood again. Akira said, “It’s better not to go.” … Shōkawa went and came back, saying Norihisa is getting angry with Rikiishi now.

Shōkawa told me not to fight. Looking at Akira, he said they came out of that generation.… Shōkawa’s father (who had committed hara-kiri and died) had told him not to fight, even if you came back crying. But if they hit you, then you can come back at them with all you’ve got—it’s alright, OK.

Akira said he “doesn’t like trouble, but that he will protect his buddies,” regardless of his own cost. Regardless of what might happen to him. There was some disagreement here … because Shōkawa said that some of the guys, even if they are buddies, are wrong and he will tell them so on such occasions … to which Hayashi said that the point of being “buddies” is that you will stand with your buddies even if they are wrong.

Akira said, “It’s important for an otoko to live every day with a sense of his ‘guilt’ (zaiakukan).” Hayashi said, in response: “You say some good things.”²¹

Everyone knew that death was awaiting them in San’ya. When cautioned about his sexual, drinking, or gambling habits, even Kentarō, who still appeared to be a functional worker, would say: “I don’t have long to go anyways.” It was not just that the group had reached an age in which their parents, if not older siblings, were likely to pass away. The guys lived with the prospect of their own death, because Tetsu, Barasawa, Ikuchi, and Ishikawa-san had already been diagnosed with cancer, and Akira was waiting for his blood vessel to rupture. Takeda-san was said to have taken on in years, since he would get drunk quickly, and Kentarō said he could not fight and win against a younger worker. Everyone, too, had witnessed friends pass away in the past. Whether they had died of natural causes, been murdered, committed suicide, or passed away as early as in their forties, Akira said, he would think of them every evening, and he could count them using all fingers. Kentarō likewise observed that it was a “good thing” to talk about the dead. For there was guilt involved in remembrance of the deceased. Akira, for instance, would recall reading the suicide note of a friend and chasing after him before he flung himself off Sakura-bashi in Asakusa. When Akira had later been living in Kotobukichō, Yokohama, two other friends committed suicide, one after the other. Discovering the body of the latter hanging from the ceiling, Akira decided to return to San’ya. There was “nothing to do,” he said. As if he was directing the violence at himself, it was similarly guilt over powerlessness that led Akira to fight three opponents in the Iroha arcade, and Shōkawa’s failure to attend his mother’s funeral led him to gamble, after which he was put in detention, only to go straight back to brawling. Nor was it a coincidence that Kentarō decided to assert the values of deference and hierarchy while Suzuki lay prostrate upstairs or that he was taunting the cops right when the ambulance arrived. State recognition had confined the guys to San’ya in an impotence that prompted them to introject the loss of family in guilt, and while their powerlessness was deflected into self-assertion, the originary cause of their predicament could only be misrecognized in neighboring men or the local police. If a slur from a neighbor or the attitude of local cops permitted reciprocity, state power otherwise kept them in their place. Despite their efforts, nothing could be done, and an early death was an inescapable fact in San’ya. With few other cultural references at their disposal, the guys could only stake their bodies, although in a gamble against death that would be lost.

That San’ya constituted a space of accelerated obsolescence and death went unremarked in society at large. In fact, if they occurred in San’ya, almost any kind of death remained beneath the threshold of general visibility. Even the twenty-nine-year-old Wakami noticed that crimes (jiken) and homicides (satsujin) in San’ya went unreported in the daily news, whereas issues that touched on politically relevant issues of the day, like gambling on welfare, made it on the nationally televised NHK. By this same token, there was never mention on the news of the many men who died from heatstroke, several every day, on the streets of San’ya in the summer.

As one Sanyukai regular said, it was ideal for the Japanese state that welfare recipients in San’ya died and, if this could not be brought about swiftly, that every last bit of surplus be extracted from them. Unlike the suicide rate of productive middle-aged salarymen, the men of San’ya were dead weight. Costs had to be cut, and while the state did give welfare, it provided a minimal amount that predisposed individuals to undertake work that no one else would want to do—that is, to put themselves to use on the black market. Naturally, such income had to be reported, but there was a systematic disincentive to declaring these earnings, since it resulted in an overall drop of income. Many men in San’ya therefore chose to live with the danger of having their welfare severed, thereby empowering the state while providing a labor force for work that was unregulated, underpaid, and unsafe. It was an economic imperative that demanded the death of San’ya, and the unabating gaze of the state prevented such death from spilling into backtalk: these men had brought it upon themselves. If welfare recipients were considered fit enough to earn their living, they were constantly reminded that they should find a proper job. Welfare officers also informed them that infractions like gambling or drinking would not be tolerated. Hardly any different, the non-welfare recipient lived in the constant precarity of never having a secure income and of being arrested for gambling, drugs, or fighting. In effect, every aspect of life in San’ya was conditioned by the threatening gaze of the state, which was nearly ubiquitous. It could materialize in anything from the look of a stranger, who might be an undercover cop or ward officer, or in the surreptitious security cameras, said to have been placed by the police.

The guys had so internalized the notion of self-responsibility that when a stranger in San’ya was murdered or died, the event did not concern them. The structural conditions that placed them in the same predicament as the victim were sidelined and deflected into rumors, which spread like quickfire. So-and-so had seen legs sticking out of a garbage can. Riku knew the suspects: they had brought it upon themselves. Someone might even comment on how surprising it was that the murder “had made it on the news,” but it might as well have been one of them. In this way, self-responsibility obstructed solidarity, and the vanishing mass of workers in San’ya were each on their own. At the end of the day, it was powerlessness before the economic order that caused the self-evidence of survival and self-responsibility, granting it the force of ideology. Either dead men had met their natural end, or they had failed to adapt to the strictures of the game.

It was a different story when everyone knew the person who had died, and this was the case regardless of how popular he had been. The flamboyant Tamura at Sanyukai had been disliked by Akira and Kubota, but news of his death was received by them as a shock. Akira broke into a sob and instantly cut the phone. Equally unnerved, Kubota said that “liking or disliking did not matter”: Tamura had been a buddy. For a few days, Tamura’s death created camaraderie among foes, for his death in his early fifties constituted a commentary on the plight of every San’ya man: repeatedly repressed yet triggered by proximity to death. Everyone knew what lay in store for them, but they nevertheless repeated the fetishized trope of the otoko. San’ya, as Akira put it, was located “next to hell.” Its aging population had already degenerated into alienated ghosts, and its suicides were said to have no social connections: no job, no friends, no family. The one future link the guys could be assured of was to the state, in death, no less.

For many aging workers, this transition from independence to welfare dependence began at Sanyukai, which helped with applications for welfare. Sanyukai itself did not receive state funding, but it enjoyed an amicable and symbiotic relationship with the state that enabled it to facilitate applications. If the ward offices relinquished troublesome cases to Sanyukai, they also returned favors, thereby allowing the NPO to broaden the circle of its dependents and to create an indebtedness that dissimulated staff dependence on donations, not to mention on the men outside. Strictly speaking, it acted as an intermediary, yet it placed itself at the very source of beneficence, personalizing its gifts in the form of cash handouts. And in demanding proper behavior, Sanyukai replicated the state discourse that threatened to sever privileges extended in the indulgent embrace of amae. The staff decided who qualified for its attentions, and those who did not give themselves to be recognized remained outside their purview. Homage had to be paid, and the price of attention was precisely the “dignity” (iji) of the “person of Yama” (yama no ningen). In this way, Sanyukai “turned a blind eye” to the excesses of San’ya, much as the local police preferred not to see the circulation of violence. It at once revived wounds and banished them to the containment of San’ya, as if these wounds did not exist, and there was nothing the men outside could do. Their acceptance by Sanyukai was conditional on silencing the injustice of their lives and conceding guilt for their misfortunes. Displaced by Sanyukai, it would be as if San’ya had never existed.

One of the less mentioned services that Sanyukai provided was, in fact, for the deceased to be included in a so-called potter’s field (muenbochi). Designed for persons without family, the potter’s field responded to a veritable problem in San’ya, because whenever someone passed away, there was the question of whether or how to contact their family, if they had any. Even before this, however, there was the question of whether a proper cremation could be afforded, not to mention whether the deceased would have wanted his family contacted or where he wanted to be entombed. Certainly, none of the guys had money for a proper cremation. They would have to scrape together, as they had for Suzuki’s hospital bill. More than likely, they would have to relinquish the body to the ward, which would manage the rest. Yet, even if a cremation could be afforded, who would take home the ashes of the departed? Akira was never in contact with his family but was confident that “someone” would retrieve his remains; however, the others were less confident, and Akira himself refused to tell his relatives that he wanted to be included in his mother’s tomb. This wish was instead bequeathed to those around him. Everyone’s family relations had fractured to the point at which the state might have to dispense of the body unless a third party intervened. When Suzuki had presented Kentarō with the money for a flight to Okinawa, the latter had refused to attend their father’s cremation. Nor had they been able to locate their other brother, who had gone missing for years. Contrary to custom, in which “the oldest son” (chōnan)—Kentarō—directed the funeral, it had therefore been Suzuki, the youngest son, who flew back to Okinawa (with money borrowed from Sakura) and pressed the incinerator button. Nor was Kentarō the only one to have traumatic paternal relations: Shōkawa’s father had committed suicide by disembowelment, and Akira had never met his father.²² He had been raised by his mother, who had carried him while she did construction work in Okinawa, raising four other children. Born of poverty, shattered and inoperative relationships had been passed on from generation to generation. Thus, when Tamura was found dead in his room, Sanyukai could not contact his family, wife, or daughters because no phone numbers were listed on his phone. Tamura had volunteered and worked at Sanyukai for more than two decades, but the only contact number that could be found was of a barmaid from the local eatery, who was the only person to attend Tamura’s funeral, aside from Sanyukai affiliates. Still, Tamura and the guys were among the fortunate, for they knew that their deaths would be noticed.

In the absence of relatives, Sanyukai organized Tamura’s funeral, and their preparations went awry from the beginning. It was not just that Tamura’s family could not be contacted. Sanyukai itself neglected to send out notices stating that Tamura had passed away and that a funeral would take place at a certain time and place, even to volunteers who had worked with him for years. Hence, on the day of the cremation, it was only a straggling crowd of Sanyukai regulars that could be seen trailing toward the station. Some of them barely able to make the trip, this was one of the few occasions when they boarded a train. But when they finally arrived at the funeral parlor, there was no cremation scheduled. Sanyukai had gotten the date wrong, and so the next day, when the funeral had actually been scheduled, only half the crowd went along.

When the group heard this story from Akira, Kentarō said it was “unthinkable” to mistake the day of a funeral. Sanyukai had not just slipped up. The missed funeral was indicative of an ethos in which the death of Sanyukai regulars was swept under the carpet. Most offensive of all, Akira said, was the fact that staff members, who had worked decades with Tamura, did not attend. In not-so-subtle ways, the line separating the staff from the men outside had been reiterated. The living, who would be memorialized, had been separated from the dying, whose deaths were administered and committed to oblivion.

Tamura’s death foreshadowed the final passing of the ways of San’ya’s day laborer. Time was running out rapidly for the guys, whose bodies were increasingly failing them. In 2015, Kentarō was hospitalized for two months and was told by doctors that he would die if he continued to drink. He looked like a “mummy” when he was discharged, Akira said, and Akira himself was drinking every day to the point at which the mixture of medication and alcohol caused him to lose mobility in his body. At this rate, it was said, Akira “does not have long to go.” It was “scary.”

It was the nearly complete absence of young men in San’ya that signaled an end to the lifestyles embodied by its aging residents. In 2013, the old postwar gathering place for day laborers, the yoseba, had long since been superseded by another flexible labor pool, dispersed across Tokyo and connected only by cell phone. Yet I recall moments from the construction site when I seemed to glimpse similarities between our older group and a younger generation of construction workers. During lunch, I could only peer across the tables of the changing room at a bunched-up group of able-bodied ironworkers, many of whom looked younger than twenty, certainly no older than twenty-five, hunched over the table as they puffed away at cigarettes, cutting a distinct difference from our group with their earrings and their golden-dyed hair. Whether these workers lived with their families, in apartments dispersed across the city, or in a company dorm, there was a clear hierarchy inscribed in their relations, as their midtwenties leader shouted instructions from the end of the table while they smoked away the remainder of their time.