Yokohama Street Life

The first time I met Nishikawa Kimitsu was on October 20, 1993, at 6 o'clock in the morning in front of the casual labor exchange in Kotobuki, the notorious Yokohama slum district. He was struggling to get a day's work on a building site in Yokohama. When I told him I was doing fieldwork for a doctorate in social anthropology, he immediately asked me if I was a Malinowskian functionalist or a Levi-Straussian structuralist. He had a copy of Levi-Strauss's Le Regard Eloigné in his pocket. He lived in a run-down doss-house, in the filthiest room I have ever seen, with cobwebs, cockroaches, empty sake bottles, overflowing ashtrays and cigarette burns on the lank and greasy tatami. The room was stuffed with teetering piles of heavyweight scholarly monographs and intellectual magazines, and the walls were graffiti'd with his obsessive pictures of Nazi concentration camp guards

Medicine · Migration, Ethnicity, and Economy · Gerontology