The memory of how three youths pounced on him one night with sticks and fists twisted Masahiko Sugai's face with pain. The homeless people living with him here, clustered under a bridge linking this city with Tokyo, avoided the topic.
But the bruises around his eyes, visible for days after the beating, testified to a new kind of crime: attacks by young men and boys on middle-aged men who have become homeless after losing their jobs and who, in the cold logic of Japan's post-bubble-economy years, are useless.
"We're most afraid of boys," Sugai, 51, said one afternoon in early September as cars and trucks rumbled overhead on the Rokugo Bridge. "They're the most dangerous."
A month later, in an unrelated case, 10 boys were arrested here for randomly assaulting three sleeping homeless men. The boys kicked the men, hit one on the head with a bicycle pump and toppled a bicycle on another, stomping on it.
The boys -- the youngest was 10, the oldest 16 -- told the police that they were "killing time," "getting rid of stress" and "disposing of society's trash." They came from normal homes and earned normal grades at school.
"They didn't stand out at all," said Kengo Honda, 54, deputy chief at the police station that investigated the case. "They didn't realize they had done something bad until we brought them to the station and questioned them."
Honda, in trying to explain the matter, spoke of the "shameful tendency in Japan to target the weak."
The police do not keep track of such crimes and most victims, like Sugai, do not report them. But Mitsuyuki Maniwa, a professor specializing in juvenile crime at Otani University in Kyoto, said such attacks had increased in the last five years and had become more violent.
"Those who have no role in society are now considered trash, just like stray cats or dogs to be disposed of," said Maniwa, who said that in the past these crimes were typically committed by troubled youths against vagrants.
More than 1,000 homeless people are believed to be living here in Kawasaki, an industrial city that has fallen on hard times. Many live in cardboard boxes near the main train station.
In Fujimi Park, they have erected scores of semipermanent wooden shacks, neatly spaced, with locks and, sometimes, ornamented windows and doors. As a sign of the suburban life many had been leading, some have transformed tiny patches of land into gardens. Many keep dogs and have bicycles. Others sit in lawn chairs in front of their shacks, reading novels.
Away from the city center, past a red-light street where foreign Asian women sit behind Amsterdam-style glass windows, about 300 homeless people live near the Tama River, dividing this city from Tokyo. Some have pitched tents on the bank, others have built shacks in bushy areas, a stone's throw from the public golf and tennis courts. Still others have found their way under the bridge.
"This is Japan here," Isamu Ishikawa said, by way of introduction, in September. "This is the Japan where people who want to work can't find work."
Ishikawa, 51, and Sugai, the man who was assaulted, have shared a corner under the bridge with several cats, a dog and a rabbit over the last three months. A young couple -- Makoto Watanabe, 33, who said he became homeless after his parents fled in the middle of the night, and Maki Ito, 28, who loved him desperately against her parents' wishes and so followed him here under the bridge -- pitched a tent. Tadashi Sakuma, a 62-year-old grand-father, homeless for several years, had built two shacks nearby but came here for the company.
The five of them usually sit around a low table on a platform covered with a straw mat, a stool picked up here, a tree trunk picked up there. In the afternoons, after they have spent the morning picking up aluminum cans or collecting lunches from the city, they relax over shochu, a cheap Japanese alcohol. Sakuma occupies the same corner, usually in a comfortable stupor.
Around lunchtime in late September, Ishikawa was frying liver and onions over a gas stove. He had prepared a blueberry sauce.
Ishikawa had worked for five years in a Japanese restaurant, starting as a dishwasher and rising to sashimi chef. He had gone to college on a baseball scholarship, but a shoulder injury forced him to drop out. He had married and had two children, and had worked at several companies, but a problem nagged him.
"I messed up because of this," he said, tapping a glass of shochu before him.
In recent years, he gravitated to the Sanya district of Tokyo, where he worked as a day laborer and first met Sugai. "But in Japan it's hard to find any work if you are over 50," he said.
He had left his family and moved into a place where he had gone three years without paying his landlord. "He was a really good guy," he said. "He never even came to demand the rent. And every morning, he'd say, `Good morning!' The guilt was too much for me."
So one night last June, Ishikawa fled, taking only his bicycle and leaving all his other belongings behind. He rode five hours to Kawasaki, his hometown, where he went to see his wife and children, but did not tell them he had become homeless.
"My wife even gave me the key to the house and told me to come whenever I wanted to," he said. "But I can't go, since I've ended up here and don't have a job. I don't have a face to show."
"Then shave off your beard!" Sakuma, seemingly asleep, blurted out to general laughter.
Under the bridge, Ishikawa found comfort in his friendship with Sugai.
"Sugai told me, `Here, when you want to cry, cry.' When I was with my family, I had to be strong. I never hit anyone. But I would yell at my wife. I was hard on her, but I loved her. That's why she handed me the key. But after I came here, I felt free. So that day I leaned against the wall of the bridge and held my futon, and cried and cried."
It was dusk already, and the traffic out of Tokyo over the bridge was getting heavier. Sugai, who had been asleep inside his tent, crawled out, his hair wildly uncombed.
"Why is everyone up so early this morning?" he said.
Weeks passed. Sugai found a gray mutt, but fell into a funk when he had to return it. He and Ishikawa decided to stop drinking. Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi was re-elected.
One recent morning, Sugai and Ishikawa returned from selling US$16.53 worth of aluminum cans at the scrapyard. A news junkie who follows world events on the radio, and speaks easily about Japanese politics as well as the civil war in the West African nation of Ivory Coast, Sugai goes to the public library these days to read books on Japan's feudal Edo era.
"I think things were easier back then," Sugai said. "During the bubble economy, the Japanese suddenly became rich and went crazy. It changed the Japanese."
Sugai worked at resort hotels for most of his life, and just five years ago oversaw 50 workers at a hotel in Karuizawa, the traditional getaway for the Japanese upper crust in the mountains west of Tokyo. But like many hotels built during the bubble economy, this one went bankrupt. Because of his age, he was unable to find another job and began working as a day laborer at construction jobs.
"My strength declined when I turned 50 and I couldn't carry heavy things anymore," he said. One hot day two summers ago, he collapsed on a construction job. "I decided to take it easy for a while and then eventually I came here under the bridge a year ago," he said.
In that time, boys had attacked him three times. In early September, he had gone out one night to a grocery store, a little drunk, when three boys called out to him, "Old man, come here!"
"`This is bad,' I remembered thinking. They go after the weak. In Japan, there is a tendency to go after the weak."
He did not want to talk about it anymore. The sun never shone under the bridge and with the approach of winter, Sugai shivered in a sweatshirt. He went to pet his rabbit.
Next to the nearby tennis court, a young woman and man dressed in white were playing badminton. They did not seem to see the people under the bridge.
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