OSAKA

Japan’s defeat in World War II exposed the country to the life of the rural peasant. Modernization slowly eliminated and pushed the day laborer from city to city seeking work. Osaka became their last bastion with the creation of the 1970 World Fair, offering a flux of job possibilities. Machines would soon replace many of those last jobs.

The “slum” of Kamagasaki was born from this boom and remained an open ghetto for, Korean prostitutes enslaved during the war replaced by Philippine migrants and the men who had been segregated by Japanese society or dishonored by their families. They became prey to alcoholism, drug abuse and to the exploitation of both police and the Yakuza mafia. Today some 50,000 residents, mostly men over fifty, live in an area often deemed by locals as, Non- Japan. Consecutive economic crisis have alternatively driven many Japanese to seek refuge in cheap single-room hostels and ashamed to seek help in classist society.