The reason of choosing this topic is because nowaday I had a chance to consider about the aweful slum in the world. Especially, I focused on the slum in Lagos, Nigeria. I belong to one youth grouo of NGO, and the other day, I and group members created a workshop of Lagos to let people know the real situation in poor areas and slum. The above picture is the sighnboard of our workshop. The picture below shows how terrible the slum in Lagos is.
As these images show, it is clear that slum in this world is really aweful, but it is the real situation. Not only Lagos but also other countries such as Philippine has same kind of slums, and there, many people live even though there is no enough infrastructure. It is hard to believe, but truth.
What I know about slums is problems are hard to solve because of conflicts between residents and governments. Problems caused by slums are ;
- water problem (really dirty)
- rise of crime rate (crimes are occured so often)
- homeless
- rapid spread of infectious disease etc.
Governments must take actions to solve actions in order to solve those problems, but especially governments in developing countries don't do so because politics in such countries doesn't work well. That is a problem.
HOWEVER, I found that this is happening in developing countries, but developed countries like the US and even Japan. As for the US, it is a well known truth that there are slum towns and there are terrible places. However, Japan is not well known of 'slum' or 'poverty', though everyone knows there are a lot of 'homeless people' here. Anyway, 'homeless' and 'slum' are kind of related to each other, so when thinking of that situation, I doubt that Japanese government doesn't do specific policies to 'poverty' in Japan. The other day, I went to the Tokyo Metropolitan government office (都庁), and found many people lives around that building, but none of officials seems to pay attention to them. This is the aspect of Japanese real social problems. Therefore, I decided to reseach on 'homeless' and 'slum' in Japan.
According to UN-Habitat (United Nations Human Settlements Programme), it is estimated about 863 million people in November 2013. This number is quite high when compared with 760 million in 2000 and 650 million in 1990.
Seen from the number of people in slums in the world, it seems more and more people are becoming 'homeless', but Japan is not the same. It means, the number of homeless people is getting less and less. According to the Ministry of Health, Labour and Welfare, 12,253 people were homeless in 2010, but in 2014, 6926 people are estimated as homeless. Because this number was estimated by the government, we don't know how accurate this number is. However, anyway, it clearly shows people who are homeless in Japan is decreasing recently, though there are still many homeless people.
This is the introduction of my project. I heard that Osaka, which is the second largest city in Japan has the very big slum. It is so hard to imagine Japan HAS the slum as well, but I want to reseach on it in order to think of solution of Japanese poverty.
Q. What makes Osaka slum?
Q. What kind of policies does the government do for solving slum issues?
Q. What is the definition of slum?
DQ
Q. How can we do to know the real Japanese situation of 'homeless'?
→what kind of way can we realize it?
Q. What do you think the core problem of Japanese slum is?
Reference
1. no author, 10 Feb 2014, 'HABITAT: NUMBER OF SLUM DWELLERS GROWS TO 863 MILLION', Cordaid, viewed on 7th October 2014
https://www.cordaid.org/en/news/un-habitat-number-slum-dwellers-grows-863-million/
2. the Ministry of Health, Labour and Welfare, 25th April 2014, 'ホームレスの実態に関する全国調査(概数調査)結果について', viewed on 7th October 2014
http://www.mhlw.go.jp/stf/houdou/2r98520000030rlj.html