Kamagasaki, located in Nishinari Ward, Osaka city, is a daily-hire laborer's concentration area, and is the space where poverty and discrimination converge. Kamagasaki, as a supply ground of the daily-hire labor force (Yoseba), was 'produced' between the 1960s and the early 1970s when policies for Kamagasaki (Airin) were developed in order to cope with a series of protests by the day laborers following the "first riot" in August 1961. This paper employs discourse analysis based on the concept of the construction of place and institutional practice and examines the construction of exclusionary boundaries enclosing daily-hire laborers in the process of the 'production' of Kamagasaki as Yoseba.
The mass media began to represent Sanno-cho as a "violence zone" focusing on the prostitution problem after the enforcement of the Anti-Prostitution Law in 1958. In this context, the mass media represented adjoining Kamagasaki as a slum, focusing on the problem of poor families. Nishinari became a place name to signify these areas as a whole. When the "first riot" took place in this context in August 1961, these representations were repeated and the "first riot" was reported as "violence".
Moreover, the process of constructing place intensified the confrontation between daily-hire laborers and their neighbors. The neighbors also felt discrimination because these place names and their representations were extensively circulated by the media reports about the "riot" and the resultant policies. Therefore, it became necessary to stop using these symbols, and a new place name, Airin, was created and given to the place that was formerly called Nishinari or Kamagasaki.
After 1960, institutional practices followed such discursive transformation. In the first stage (1960-1961), the objective of policy was to improve the living conditions of poor families. In the second stage (1961-1966), it became the objective of policy to distribute families and to institutionalize and to supervise the daily-hire labor market, because it was necessary to cope with the "riot". In the third stage after 1966, when Kamagasaki was specified as the Airin District, comprehensive planning to make Kamagasaki a supply ground of the daily-hire labor force was instituted. At this stage, the state promoted the policies and assessed the existence of day laborers positively from the viewpoint of the necessity to secure a labor force. The Airin General Center and The City Rehabilitation Clinic were embodied as the objective of such policies.
Meanwhile, the cheap inns, as the habitation space of the daily-hire laborers, were renewed in the 1960s, in expectation of an inflow of the labor force which was needed to build the site of the International Exposition in 1970. That increased the capacity of the inns and narrowed their size. On the other hand, day payment apartments and squatter huts decreased in number at that time and, therefore, the habitation space for families was reduced. This change of space transformed Kamagasaki into a space exclusively for single daily-hire laborers.
The boundaries of the Airin District reflected the representation of Kamagasaki created by discursive formation. It became institutionalized, which reproduced severe exploitation and poverty by being defined as a supply ground of the daily-hire labor force. This spatial boundary construction reproduced itself socially between the daily-hire laborers and their neighbors.
抄録全体を表示