recently I visited Tokyo's largest slum an area so hidden it has been purposely
written off of all modern Maps yet still exists in shocking poverty
just two kilometers from one of Tokyo's biggest tourist attractions is a completely
different world of homelessness and Welfare welcome to the other side of the tracks
oh my gosh this is a rough area
so I just got sexually harassed the Japan you were not supposed to see
for over 200 years this area has housed The Untouchables of society all the way
until today where day laborers line the streets collecting welfare checks it's
such a taboo topic here that most people in Tokyo don't even realize this place exists
yet it's been right under our eyes this whole time
this is where you take tourists no this is where you don't take tourists welcome to Sanya
exiting the station Minamisenju in the northeast corner of Tokyo this area will not
immediately strike you as unusual but in fact 88 percent of residents here are on welfare and as
you walk closer to namidabashi ironically called The Bridge of Tears you will see a large number
of low-budget hostels which are mainly used to house the day laborers and homeless population
wow all of these are just hotel after hotel after Hotel I've never seen anything like this here is
yet another one of these little hostels that you can stay in for the low price of 2250 yen a night
a little under twenty dollars one night two thousand three hundred yen they have
air conditioning they have Heating and we just walked next door there's another one
recently an increasing number of tourists have decided to stay in these hostels as
a low budget option if you decide to do so I suggest you do your research and find one
that's a little bit better put together otherwise just Don't Look Under the Bed
perhaps a lot of us wouldn't consider this an option but for the homeless population it's a
lot better than the alternative which is why the welfare center hands out discount cards
for day laborers to stay in these hostels although there's been some conflict as to
what qualifies someone as a day laborer oh stop discriminating against homeless people give us
cards they're kind of doing a little bit of a protest here against the welfare center who's
apparently not giving them cards there are two million people on welfare and half of them are
over the age of 65 so Japan has an aging Society this is something that pretty much Everyone Knows
by this point over 20 almost 30 percent of the population is over 65 years old 88 of residents
in this area are on government welfare and the average age of the residence is almost
70 years old and so you can see the connection between the elderly and poverty here in Japan
it's kind of an invisible problem but if you come to an area like Sanya you can definitely see it
so everything is quite cheap here anything for 100 yen which is normally not the price it's
normally for something like this I get this tea a lot normally 140 so you get a discount here
and I've never seen newspapers for sale so there's definitely a lot of elderly people living here
100 yen for 12 hours that's quite a deal that's way cheaper than the stations
so I think this is the Japanese government's way of getting homeless people to put their stuff
into lockers rather than leaving it out on the street under a blue tarp which is what I've
seen in other areas here we have a a coin locker system that doubles as a washing machine so you
can wash your clothes and you can put your stuff in here I haven't seen this kind of combination
ever before in Japan's pretty interesting that's a sign we have two advertisements posters for
the Communist Party the one on the bottom says freedom and peace Japanese Communist party uh
give us rent and lower taxes lower consumption tax lots of garbage around here I know people
say there's no garbage in Tokyo there definitely is and I've done volunteer activities where I've
cleaned this kind of stuff up maybe not this bad though who we got in here we got shoes
we got yeah there's some shoes boots ladies boots
oh you can't get into this park let's go into the park yeah
this is the area
where they play
shogi
shogi is like Chinese chess
no no no no no no no no no no no no oh my gosh this is a rough area
so this is where you can take tourists no this is where you don't take tourists what
did you you didn't even understand and I just told you what they said
I think it's what I would expect from an area like this there are three big slums in Japan the
biggest is in Osaka nishinari the second biggest is in Yokohama kotobukicho and the third one is in
Tokyo Sanya that's the area we're in now but you will not see Sanya written on any signs
because the name has been changed since the 1960s yeah what do you think I think in in a
way you need to go looking for for it though yeah like uh we walked around for quite a while well
for a few minutes because we got lost it's not like in your face yeah but it's there yeah like
definitely there right homelessness in Japan is not in your face but it's definitely there
so this is Nathan by the way hello ninja monkey Channel
make sure you subscribe to Nathan's Channel as well because uh he's helping me out because I
wasn't gonna go here alone no he didn't give me any trouble this is just a bunch of elderly
men and they sit around and they drink and they play Chinese chess places to hit when you come
to Tokyo right you want a different experience of Tokyo well that was very different certainly
over the next 10 years the number of people over 65 in Japan is expected to increase dramatically
which means problems like we saw here in Sanya are only going to get worse in the rest of the country
from the Edo era over 200 years ago where this was a designated area for society's undesirables
to post World War II Japan where starving people were relocated from ueno station over to Minamisenju
here in Sanya this area has seen a lot of very dark history but it's something that
people don't really want to talk about so please subscribe to my channel for more of the Unseen
non-touristy real side of Japan and go to the video description where you can donate to an
organization that's helping homeless people here in Sanya and hoping for a better future [Music]