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.
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