Maintaining Autonomy: The Plight of the American Skid Row and Japanese Yoseba

This article applies a social order analysis to both the classic American skid rows and the Japanese yoseba (day labor pools) and finds that many of the resources that were available in the American skid rows such as casual labor, affordable SRO-style housing, reciprocal bonds of friendship, and cheap eateries are still available in the Japanese yoseba. However, as urban America faced economic and ecological changes in the post WWII era which eventually lead to the demise of skid row communities and consequently the evolution of a largely public assistance dependent “new” homeless population, the communities of the Japanese yoseba currently face similar threats to their livelihood largely due to the sharp decrease in demand for day labor since the onset of the Heisei recession in 1991. Additionally, policy recommendations for the Japanese to preserve the resources of the yoseba communities are made in light of similar historical experiences in the United States.