via boston

Japan’s economic boom once kept the men in the Kamagasaki district of Osaka busy working on buildings and highways. Now they pass the time waiting in free-meal lines and collecting cans.

“It’s become a dumping ground of old men, where alcoholism, poverty, suicide and loneliness prevail,” said Shiho Fukada, a freelance photojournalist.

She spent a month in the community for the first in a four-part series about the human effects of the financial crisis in Japan, which is in its worst recession since World War II. Her grim but deeply intimate images of Kamagasaki recently earned her a grant from the Alicia Patterson Foundation.

Ms. Fukada first learned about the thousands of aging laborers in Kamagasaki from an article in The New York Times in 2008. At the time, the Tokyo native was living in New York, and it had been 10 years since she last lived in Japan. She felt shocked.

“I didn’t know people were dying from starvation,” Ms. Fukada said. “For a long time, Japan has been associated with prosperity, and that’s the country I knew and grew up in. Everyone was middle class.”

Many of the men moved to Kamagasaki in the 1960s when the country’s economy was taking off and a local day labor center seemed to offer a never-ending supply of construction jobs. But that came to a halt end in the late 1990s when the real estate bubble burst.

The average age in this predominantly male neighborhood of 30,000 is just below 60 — too young to receive government assistance and too old to secure regular work. Most of them have no family ties and live alone. Some are social outcasts, escaping debts or a criminal past, and asked Ms. Fukada not to expose their faces.

“It’s a community of lonely isolated individuals living together,” she said. “One man told me that if you don’t see someone for one week, you just assume that they’re dead.”

But despite their bleak situation, many maintain a strong sense of pride and an eagerness to work. Panhandling is rare, even among the homeless, which number close to a thousand.

One man Ms. Fukada met while hanging out in a park asked her to photograph him the following day. He had just gotten a temporary job mopping the floor of the day labor center, a place where he used to find high-paying work. It was important for him to be seen in a productive way.

“We put so much importance on work for our self worth — but what do you do when you can’t find any?” Ms. Fukada said. “You know, at some level, we’re all disposable.”

Now, living in Beijing, she said it was impossible to ignore the demise of Japan’s status as a major economic power. While it’s the second-largest economy in the world, after the United States, economists say China could bypass it as soon as next year.

Ms. Fukada has been working in China since May 2008 when a devastating earthquake struck the Sichuan Province. The Times nominated her poignant photographs for a Pulitzer Prize in breaking news.

via NYT