New Towns and old people
Dear readers, this edition of Life is Hard Walk will be a little different. Let’s start from today’s photos (as you will see, I actually took them on two different days).
The buildings you see above are called danchi. That’s the Japanese word for a cluster of apartment buildings of a particular style and design, typically built as public housing by government authorities.
All the buildings in a particular danchi look exactly the same. That’s why they are numbered; to guide visitors and help drunk people find their way home.
The rent payment for a danchi is much cheaper than that of a common apartment, but prospective tenants must usually participate in a lottery, which means the waiting list can often run years.
One of the issues related to danchi life is its rapidly aging population. I quote from the Wikipedia:
Today, fewer and fewer Japanese live in the rapidly aging danchi, preferring detached houses or condominiums, known as mansion (マンション, manshon).
Due to the mass influx of young families into danchi in a short period of time from the 1950s through 1970s, age groups of danchi neighborhoods are much more uniform compared to other neighborhoods in Japan.
Since the 2000s, it became a major social issue in Japan due to its rapidly aging population, with a majority of the population being pensioners with their dependents living elsewhere.
The rapidly aging population have caused nearby stores, public facilities and schools to close, further keeping young families from moving into danchi neighborhoods.
Seniors living in danchi often face isolation and are susceptible to kodokushi, a phenomenon of dying alone and not being discovered. Men living alone are especially vulnerable.
Some danchi have attracted young immigrants and foreign worker families from outside of Japan, gradually lowering the average age of the population, although the seniors still face isolation.
The following is an article I wrote in May 2019 about an elderly manga artist to lives in a danchi and has recently started chronicling her life in comic form.
On a sunny Friday afternoon, the district south of Tama Center Station is full of couples and families having a good time. Many are headed to Sanrio Puroland, the indoor amusement park devoted to Hello Kitty and friends, just a ten-minute walk away. But if you go past Kitty-chan’s pastel-colored castle and keep walking eastward, you reach a forest of danchi (public housing apartment buildings) now mainly inhabited by senior citizens. I’m here to meet one of them, 72-year-old manga artist Saito Nazuna. She lives alone, like many of the local elderly, sharing her small apartment with her five cats.
Born near Mount Fuji in 1946, Saito moved with her family to Tokyo where she attended junior college. “I majored in Home Economics,” Saito says. “At the time it was nicknamed hanayome gakko (bride school) because it trained bachelor girls in homemaking arts and prepared them to married life. I didn’t get married soon, though (laughs). So after graduating, in order to improve my chances of employment and be economically independent I enrolled in an English conversation school while doing different jobs like waiting tables in a café. I never mastered the English language, I’m sad to say, but eventually was hired at the language school as a staffer.”
While doing clerical work at the English school, Saito began to help another employee who was in charge of drawing illustrations for the school’s textbooks. “When my colleague quit, I was handed her job,” Saito says. “After that I was asked to draw illustrations for a book publisher. Eventually I quit the English school and became a full-time freelance illustrator. I did any sort of projects, from book covers to posters. I even did a once-a-week gig for Sankei Sports, a daily sports newspaper.”
For many years the publisher supplied Saito with an endless stream of work, but when she turned 40 her source of income began to dry up. “Looking for new job opportunities, I submitted a manga story to Shogakukan [a major Japanese publisher] and won the Big Comic Award for new artists,” Saito says. “So you could say I became a comic artist almost by chance.”
Saito kept busy making critically acclaimed manga all through the 1990s, but toward the end of the decade she dropped out and didn’t make anything new until recently.
When Saito was 60, she was offered a teaching job at Kyoto Seika University’s Faculty of Manga. This is the institute that in 2006 established the Kyoto International Manga Museum. “I teach drawing technique on Mondays and Tuesdays,” she says. “I leave home very early on Monday morning, take the Shinkansen to Kyoto and spend a night there. But recently, at my age, it’s getting harder and harder to commute every week. Well, anyway this will be my last year at Seika.”
While her university job is coming to an end, Saito keeps teaching at home, where she has started the Tama Manga School. “I don’t have much space to teach but I like to encourage people, both kids and adults, to pursue their passion,” she says. “Manga is a powerful tool to express your ideas and feelings.”
Though the weekly commute to Kyoto is hard, it was thanks to Saito’s students that she began to draw manga again. “When I started, I was so busy, between teaching and looking after my sick parents and husband, that I didn’t even have the time to think about comics,” Saito says. “At the same time, though, I found myself in a stimulating environment, surrounded by youngsters for the first time after many years. They have talent and are so enthusiastic about comic art that their passion rubbed off on me. They have been a constant source of inspiration.
The result of this synergy was “Toraware no hito” (The prisoner), the story – inspired by her own personal experiences – of the last moments in the life of an embittered elderly woman told through her children’s memories and her hallucinations. “This story came out in 2012,” Saito says. “A manga critic saw it and put me in touch with Ax magazine. They said old age was an interesting subject and encouraged me to write more.
So, in 2015 I finally made “Bocchi-shi-kan” (Solitary Death Bldg. / Die Alone Bldg.), a comic born from my observations of the old people who live in my neighborhood.”
These two comics were eventually collected into a book, (together with eight old short stories from the early ‘90s) that this year was awarded two prizes including one at the Japan Media Arts Festival.
Saito was later asked by Shogakukan to turn “Bocchi-shi-kan” into a series. “I wrote two more stories, but then I had a cerebral infarction and had to stop,” she says. “Luckily it was just a light stroke, and recently I’ve resumed drawing again… alas very slowly. My hand is not as steady as before”.
Even now, Saito does all her drawing by hand. “Because paper screentone is expensive, I tried to apply it by using PC software but I’m hapless with computers. Instead of a small-dot background I ended up with huge polka dots! So I gave up (laughs). I should learn from scratch, but I’m lazy by nature, and at my age, anyway, I don’t think it’s worth the effort.”
Tama Center Station is the designated center of Tama New Town, one of the oldest and biggest “new towns” in Japan, with a population of 200,000. New towns are planned communities that were built around big cities during the economic boom of the 1960s in order to accommodate the rapid influx of workers from rural areas. Each of the 46 communities that were built following the 1963 New Housing and Urban Development Act was a self-contained commuter town with their own roads, parks, schools, hospitals and shops.
Saito has lived in Tama New Town for the last 40 years, and the world of danchi was the main subject of her 1994 collection, Meiro no nai machi (The town without mazes). “These building complexes are artificially planned and designed towns, so they only have straights streets, it’s impossible to get lost,” she says.
“However, the people who inhabit these places often get emotionally lost. They have their own troubles and worries, their psychological wounds. Everybody searches for a little bit of happiness. Every day passes unremarkably until a problem suddenly arises and they don’t know what to do.”
The hilly terrain of many new towns, once considered an ideal environment, has turned into a problem for many senior residents who have difficulty climbing stairs and walking up and down the slopes. “On the other hand, it’s good for your legs,” Saito says. “It keeps them strong, or so they say (laughs).”
The danchi where Saito lived at the time was comprised of five-story condos. Those buildings lacked elevators, so when her husband became ill, they moved to a nearby danchi, in a taller building with an elevator. Saito has lived there for the last ten years.
The New Town portrayed in Meiro no nai machi is the place Saito used to live before. “Both the place and I were much younger then,” she says. “I wrote about the couples who lived in that danchi, even a few love stories. But now I can only write about old people waiting to die.”
The area looks nice and is full of trees and flowerbeds. It’s very quiet. Too quiet, actually. The whole time I’m there I don’t see a single person. The overall effect is of a well-maintained abandoned place.
“Don’t worry, people still live here,” Saito chuckles. “This place and these people have become my favorite subjects: gossip between neighbors; health problems; taking care of the local stray cats; solitude; and the occasional case of kodokushi (someone who lives alone and dies of natural causes at home without anyone knowing). Old people may look boring, but once you get to know them, they are fascinating and full of interesting stories.”
Saito’s small apartment is on the seventh floor and from her balcony we can see both forests: one made of trees and the other of numbered condos. She shows me her work corner where she creates her manga. “Before I could draw all the time,” she says, “but after a while I ran out of interesting ideas and had to slow down. Now I’ve got my inspiration back, but keeping to a regular schedule has become very hard, so I only draw when I have the time or feel like it. I can’t stay up all night to beat a deadline like I used to.”
We talk about the two upcoming award ceremonies that Saito will attend, and she confesses she is completely out of the manga world now. “When I was younger I used to read Garo and COM magazines but now I seldom read manga,” she says. “At university, my colleagues are always talking about new artist and titles, but it all goes over my head.
“Even now, after all these years, it feels strange to call myself a mangaka. But I’m happy I can make a living out of drawing comics… considering how badly I failed at learning English (laughs).”
Some of these places are in nice locations. One complex is near Uraga on my regular walk from Mabori kaigan to Kurihama in Kanagawa Prefecture.
This was fascinating to learn about Danchi and of Saito’s life/career. As someone involved in urban development and design, I’m especially sensitive to the way exterior landscapes impact our daily life and over all health and connections to others. Thank you for writing this piece. I’d love to find a copy of this comic!