Kamagasaki Fieldwork

We gathered in front of the east wicket of JR Shin-Imamiya Station. About 30 of teachers. The gathering was drawing some people's attention. Some young girls were delivering suspicious looks to us. I was going to take a field-work class, one of the elective classes to renew my teacher's license. After a lecture in a building near the station, we started off to the city in the midst of the baking hotness. You can easily find more vending machines, more coin-operated laundries, and even more coin-operated lockers even along the streets once you walk into the Kamagasaki area, the poorest, not one of the poorest but actually the poorest, area in Japan. It's a kind of a wonder that so many stuffs are coin-operated in the poorest area in Japan. The second monotonous feature you find in the town might be rents of apartment rooms. Most of the signs you can find on the front windows of real estate agents or apartment buildings themselves show ¥42,000/a month, the highest rent the Livelihood Protection Law permits. Soft drinks sold by the vending machines in the Kamagasaki area are surprisingly cheap. Especially in the core area, I could find vending machines with ¥50 canned drinks and ¥80 PET bottled ones. In other areas in Japan, if you can find vending machines with ¥100 canned drinks, they are buys. They say that the Kamagasaki area used to center round on day laborers. Flophouses, liquor stalls, and as such. Many day laborers have become on welfare. The area has changed its looks and state themselves. In its core area, so-called poverty industries have come into existence. Its outskirts are looking for other industries.