Net Café Nanmin
Digitally connected but socially off the track – Japan’s internet café homeless
While the Japanese economic slow-down is nothing new any more, the homeless population grows gradually in urban areas like Tokyo. An interesting trend is that the average age of the homeless population lowers, and they start the unique urban homeless lifestyle: They are the people who are referred as “net café refugees.”
Net café, a shortened name of the internet café in Japanese, is everywhere in big cities in the country. Unlike the usual internet café seen in the US cities, the Japanese net café is open for 24 hours, and provides a small cubicle with a computer with internet connection: In addition, they make the café cozier and more relaxing by providing bottomless soft drinks, slippers, wake-up call service, power outlet for battery chargers, massage chairs, blankets, hair driers and toiletries for sale. These amenities are added to the net café business to provide some space in the crowded city to sit down for rest, chit-chat with friends, killing time before the next meeting, waiting for the next long-distance train, or simply to check e-mails or surf on the internet. However, the “refugees” found how to maximize these amenities for the amount they pay at the cafés: These cafés’ environments turned out to be perfect enough for today’s urban lifestyle and made the urban homeless population into net café dwellers.
Most of the net cafés in Japan are renovated from manga-kissa, comic book cafés, where customers pay for a space to sit down and read manga comic books from their bookshelves as long as they want over a cup of coffee or sodas. Although the manga-kissa was considered rather dark and as a nerds’ hang-out, net café doesn’t particularly target the comic book aficionado: Instead, it became the birthplace of the net café refugees.
As the media coverage on this phenomenon and the government concern grow, the term “net café refugees” was picked by the Japanese dictionary publisher for one of the buzz words of the year in 2007. “Our customers are not refugee. They pay for our service,” a net café business owners’ association claims that it is discriminatory and irrelevant to use the term “refugee” to their own customers.
In August 2007, the Japanese Ministry of Health, Labor and Welfare report counts 5,400 net café dwellers across the country in 2007; about 80% of them are in Tokyo. Due to the recession that the Japanese younger generation never experienced before, 66% of the net café refugees claim they don’t have enough to make a down payment, 38% claim that they don’t have consistent income to pay rent, and 31% claim that they can’t get a reference letter to get a place to live. They take odd jobs and do day work in big cities at the minimum wage, which is way too little to pay the rent. Their lifeline to these job opportunities are cell phones and the internet, and the net café equips them with all they need.
To prevent them from shifting out on the street, the Tokyo Metropolitan Government decided to employ a relieve measurement: If the refugee is evaluated to be capable of getting a secure job, the government lend up to 600,000 yen (about $5,400) to settle down in a reasonable place to live. Although this policy is implemented for the first time in the country, now that the country officially announced that the recession is over in 2003, Japan’s working poor may still struggle to adjust the new economic turn-up. The Japanese society quietly hopes that the net café refugees somehow find the way out from the digital connection of the internet cafés.
—- Reported by Nori Akashi, Photo by Ryosuke Kawasaki
The cubicle is large enough to accommodate the computer,
a small desk and enough room to sleep. It is private enough for a sound deep just like at home.
Take whatever you need: the amenity section has a large variety of items
that you would need to sleep over just like a convenience store.
