ˇ÷Report on the Evictions in Nagai Park, Osaka ˇˇDocumented on March 16th, 2001 INTRODUCTION The social policy of the Japanese government for homeless people who are called with a discriminative word "Furousha" (vagrant) has been traditionally based on a principle of segregation and internment. Since the summer of 2000 until now the Osaka City government's policy on the homeless people in Nagai Park, Osaka is the "modern" version of the said principle. This report will explain the process and the meaning of the problems that happened in Nagai Park which have been the most noticeable issue among homeless movement in Japan in this half year. And even now, pressure activities to evict the homeless people living in Nagai Park are on-going. THE PROBLEM The locale is Nagai Park, Higashi Sumiyoshi-ku, Osaka City. In August 2000 about 480 tents were standing side by side inside the park. NGOs estimate the number of homeless people in Osaka Prefecture to be between 10,000 to 15,000. The government's research in August 1998 indicated 8,660. Nagai Park is one of the areas where the number has seriously increased in two years. (1) The Shelter Plan and its Problems Just before the summer of 2000 the Osaka Prefecture Government planned to build a (temporary) shelter for homeless in Nagai Park. The shelter occupies about 3,300 sq. meter where homeless people would be interned with a limit of three years. The problems about the shelter at that time were the following: 1) The plan of the shelter was made not for the improvement of homeless people's lives nor for human rights protection but for inviting the World Cup Succor Game in 2002 and Olympic Game in 2008. Osaka was preparing to accept the visit of the inspection team of IOC in February 2001. The idea of shelter itself is no better than the traditional segregation and internment policy. 2) As if to prove it, the land of the shelter was surrounded by high steel boards as blinds. The movement of the residents going out and coming back of the residents is "strictly" checked for 24 hours. 3) The construction of the shelter required the demolition of the tents in Nagai Park. The Department of Welfare of Osaka City stated "There are possibilities of forced demolition" and said it would stop the building of new tents as well as remove the existing tents by all means. 4) There were no consultations with the homeless people living in Nagai Park since the plan became known by the public. When they learned about it, more than 90% of the homeless people in Nagai Park protested against the plan of the shelter and said they would not use it. (2) "Site Orientation" to the Homeless People "Site Orientation" to the homeless people was implemented on September 26th and October 5th in Nagai Park. A total of five orientations were held. In the first orientation Osaka City promised that "the city will implement a research and individual consultations, and they will not do any policy aiming to evict the homeless." However, at exactly the same time as the orientation, Osaka City mayor and the governor of Osaka Prefecture had a meeting and at the press conference after the meeting said that "It will never be solved if we do not have the determination to force the homeless people to move to the shelter even if we have to use some legal command", (meaning forced evictions). Osaka City made free use of "double-tongue." At the second orientation hot arguments took place. Answering to the intensive questions by homeless people and groups, like the Association of Poor People in Nagai Park, the Osaka City Committee of Homeless People Policies stated that they will not use the procedure of legal command (forced eviction) if the people refuse to move to the shelter. They also said that they would use persuasion to convince the homeless people to move to the shelter and discuss the methods together with the people. In short, the government declared that they would not use forced eviction. (3) The Circumstances after the Opening of the Shelter The shelter opened on December 29th, 2000 and by the beginning of 2001, the number of the tents of the homeless in Nagai Park had gone down. The background of the situation was explained in the petition letter to Osaka City written on February 2nd. Following is the explanation. After the opening of the shelter the city insistently continued to "persuade" the people, who did not want to enter the shelter and still preferred to continue living in the tents. Before the opening there were about 480 tents in the park and 90 % of them refused to enter the shelter. However, because of the "insistent persuasion," 135 people entered the temporary shelter by the end of January 2001. But more people, about 180 people, applied for public assistance without entering the shelter, while more than 100 people unwillingly moved to other parks because of the everyday "persuasion" or harassment. At present there are about 50 people left in the Nagai Park, and the insistent "persuasion" still continues. The strategy of "persuasion" meaning harassment is the distorted interpretation of the words of the committee representative in the second orientation on October 5th. (4) The Problems of the Shelter The problems of the shelter are the following three: 1. When the people enter the shelter they have to sign a written oath saying they give up the tent and will never go back to live in the park. And their tents were demolished. 2. In the beginning people were told the shelter serves meals, but after the new year, the meal service was reduced to only once a day and the menu is only rice and some pickles. 3. The temporary shelter is supposedly a transit shelter before the homeless people enter the "self-help center" which supports homeless people to get jobs. However, people in "self-help centers" find it difficult to find jobs, so that people in the temporary shelter are stuck there and cannot transfer to the "self-help center." (People are allowed to find jobs in the temporary shelter but there is no support from government.) (5) The Movement of the Remaining Homeless The homeless people remaining in the park established a group for movement and built some tents just in front of the shelter to use as a center for their activities and also for an accommodation for some people who want to get out of the shelter. The tent can be said as "a shelter of the shelter." This is also the expression of the homeless people's protest against the government. (6) Eviction and the Protest Against It The government began to forcibly evict the tents in front of the government constructed shelter on January 23rd, 2001. The movement raised the following three points as protest and appealed the injustice being committed by Osaka City on the homeless movement to citizens all over Japan, housing rights movements abroad, including the UN special rapporteur on housing rights. 1. The forced eviction contradicts the Osaka City's promise not to do forced eviction on October 5th, 2000. 2. If the first shelter in Japan for homeless people will be justified, including the eviction of the 480 tents in Nagai Park, this becomes the most terrible example of the government policies for homeless people in Japan which just started recently. 3. From the beginning, the shelter is not the one which the homeless people themselves wanted. Rather it is the institution for segregation and internment of homeless people in order to hide them from the other countries in connection with the bid of the Osaka Prefecture to host the Olympic Games in 2008. Nagai Park has a soccer ground for Olympic Games. The eviction at the end of January was a political strategy related to the inspection activity conducted by IOC members in February 2001. The government never accepted the participation of the homeless people. After a fierce argument on February 14th, Osaka City promised not to continue the "persuasion" to the 50 tents. Accepting the promise, the movement group moved the tents in front of the shelter to 300 meters away. However, after that, in stead of the "persuasion" by government officers, harassment by policemen started. (7) Inspection by IOC From February 25th to March 1st the IOC inspection team composed of 17 persons visited the stadiums in the Osaka area. The team visited Nagai Park on February 26th. Preparing for the inspection, on January 19th the office of the park of Osaka City posted notifications on tents, saying "If this object will not be removed by February 26th (by the resident), the office will demolish it." It was implemented for some tents on February 27th and 28th. From February 22nd to 25th, just before the inspection period, policemen visited several tents and threatened the homeless people saying "This tent is illegal so we can break it." And after the inspection the threatening by policemen has stopped but the usual harassment to homeless people is still continuing in other parks. CONCLUSION At last the Osaka City government attained their purpose. Finally by the time of the inspection by IOC, they had succeeded in evicting most of the residential tents and the base tents for the homeless people movement. The most serious problem in this shelter issue which caused the violation of human rights such as the use of harrassment in forced eviction was that the government ignored the opinions and expectations of the affected homeless people. The temporary shelter plan itself does not aim to protect or support the homeless people, but to evict the homeless people from the beginning. The orientation for the homeless people was held for five times but it did not mean that the people's opinions were respected. Some 135 people chose to enter the shelter, but because of the bad living conditions there, some people have already left and more people are likely to leave the shelter after the climate becomes warm. They will go to some other parks or streets in Osaka. Osaka City has Osaka Castle Park where more than 1,000 homeless people live and Nishinari Park where 300 people live. It is highly probable that the similar eviction problems will be happen in these parkas in the near future after the precedent in Nagai Park. SIGNIFICANCE OF THE PROBLEMS IN NAGAI PARK Concerning some of the local governments' policies and the movements for homeless people since this several years, we can see the importance and the seriousness of the problems in Nagai Park. Since the fire which burned many of carton-board-shanties in the West Exit of Shinjuku Station in Tokyo in February 1998, Tokyo Prefecture changed their policy principle from the traditional principle of "exclusion or internment" and agreed not to force people to accept "exclusion" or "internment." Because of this agreement, a homeless movement network in Shinjuku changed their stance and agreed to the Tokyo Prefecture government's idea of self-help center for homeless people. The series of arguments about the self-help center in several cities in Japan for two years after that was based on the agreement not to force people to chose "exclusion" or "internment." However, the series of eviction and internment implemented in Nagai Park was a distortion of the principle of the policy. The government interns the people to the temporary shelter. Those who reject the shelter the government excludes, meaning government will not provide them assistance such as food, including assistance in the search for jobs. It must have a big impact to other areas in Japan because Osaka has the biggest number of homeless people in Japan. >>>>PRESS BACK-KEY<<<<