Box-City

Ikebukuro Station is the second largest station in Japan, if not Asia. It is also home to two of the largest department stores in the world - Seibu and Tobu.

Every day, over two million commuters stream through the station; teenage boys with designer Nike gear; teenage school girls with their uniform skirts rolled up at the waist, their hems falling just below the panty-line (ah, memories); young affluent couples with matching Louis Vuitton handbags. There is demonstrable wealth flowing through the crowds at any given second.

But beneath the station proper, along one of the corridors connecting the subway to the outside world, lives another piece of Tokyo. About 30 homeless men 'live' in this part of Tokyo. Their homes are boxes, their friends are the temporary tenants of the next box, their shoes are absent. Each camp is an intricate cardboard structure which manages to conceal them, save for their feet which stick out one side.

Every morning Tokyo commuters flood through this corridor and there is a remarkable display of ambivalence. These men rarely get beaten up (except for the occasional well-publicised assault by Nike branded teens), nor do they bother the commuters. Here, they sleep for most of the day and their feet, which stick out of their (just-there) trousers, are always covered in blisters and sores, like they?fve walked across Japan without a break.

I am continually surprised that they don?ft come up to me with their hands open and hungry asking me for money for the ?etrain fare home?f. Maybe they don?ft ask because I?fm a foreigner and they think I won?ft understand what they are saying, but the dialogue of an outstretched hand is spoken in a universal language.

Is it the pride of the Japanese that stop them from begging, and choose to forage through garbages or starve instead? In Australia they would be panhandling, pickpocketing, picking fights, or unleashing their drunken anguish on passers-by but here they are the evergreen law-abiding citizens, too stuck in the Japanese acceptance of the status quo to realize that the government is bending them over a cake-hole and shafting them.