Transformation of Public Housing Policy and Its Impacts on the Residents in Japanese Suburbs

A lot of critical debates relating to Japanese suburb (ageing, juvenile delinquency, absence of local identity, etc.) have not made inroads into the myth of a homogeneous and stable space populated by non-foreign residents from the middle classes. However, with installation of the "precariat", driven out of the city center by gentrification on one hand, and with transformation of Japanese public housing policy on the other hand, a new face of the suburbs appears: public housing for insecure populations (old people living alone, handicapped people, single-parent households) or semi-public housing hired by companies for their temporary workers including precarious foreigners make it a space of exclusion characterized by heterogeneity and instability where the whole range of "wasted lives" (Bauman, 2003) is concentrated. It is a very-known fact that territorial fixation is one of the major difficulties for the people of segregated districts, who are not able to “escape” from there (Wacquant, 2007). But that should not make one forget another difficulty: that is the difficulty of not being able to stay in one place, by having to be constantly moving. Because staying in one place also means settling down (establishing a family, sending one’s children to school, having regular dealings with neighbors as a member of the local society, possibility of borrowing money from banks, etc). On the basis of a survey in the Tokyo suburb area, this paper examines the impact of those changes on (semi) public housing residents, especially where they go and how their lives are changed by their movements.