Empowerment and the Role of Space in Homeless Activism in Contemporary Japan

Since the turn of the millennium authorities in Japan have conducted an increasingly intensive campaign to evict homeless people from parks and riverbanks. In response, activists and homeless people have demanded the right for the homeless to live in their encampments, or “tent villages”, without fear of eviction. Using the struggles over the encampments in the Shinjuku underground passages in Tokyo in the mid-90s, Osaka’s Nagai Park in 2007 and Tokyo’s Miyashita Park in 2010 as examples, I argue that homeless activism offers important insights into how activists use space in the course of a political struggle and how this usage is related to transformations in the notion of publicness. Paying attention to how activists use space helps us to see that activism is not always oriented to participation in the public sphere. To bring this out I focus on three notions of space towards which activists in the homeless movement have been oriented: official public space, counter-space and no-man’s-land. Officially recognized public space helps political challengers to project messages to a wider public but also imposes limits on the radicalness of demands and conduct. Counter-spaces are spaces for the provocative visibilization of behaviour that is subject to sanctions in mainstream public areas. No-man’s-lands permit behaviour considered contrary to mainstream norms, but unlike counter-spaces they are not created in order to challenge these norms publicly; instead they thrive on official neglect. I argue that each of these conceptions of space are needed to understand the development and the dynamics of homeless activism. I also argue that each of them has political import. In particular, access to alternative arenas such as counter-spaces or no-man’s-lands has been important in processes of empowerment – the strengthening of people’s self-confidence as political actors.