Making Heterogeneous Space: Land Development and the Proletarianization of Urban Underclass in Post War Japan

Abstract

This paper aims to focus on a correlation between urban land development and a “proletarianization” of day-laborers by examining Mitsui Fudosan Group [Mitsui Real Estate Group] as an agent of urban developments and construction industry in Japan, with examining daylaborers’ riots and moral economy as a counter-culture against gentrified urban spaces.It is necessary to acknowledge the fact that the national projects – maintained by the closed market and the subcontracting labor system in the construction industry – also induce a radical opposition against the urban development. Although national projects are inevitably accompanied by gentrification, eviction of the homeless, and social exclusion of the underclass, unavoidable transgression or deviation conflicts with urban development, such as periodic and spontaneous riots by day-laborers, demonstrates a vulnerability of the national unity. In fact, the day-laborers changed the street labor market into their own field in order to overturn the hierarchy determined by the subcontracting structure in the construction industry. Their bodily expression in the form of riots had radically transgressed the ideas promoted in the 1964 Tokyo Olympics as “One World,” or the 1970 Osaka Expo as “Progress and Harmony for Mankind.” The Olympic legacy was disrupted boldly and transformed into a radical egalitarian thought in this sense. The underclass is immediately defined and commodified by national projects, however, it does not mean that its body is completely involved in its time and space.