Puritan demands

Tokyo
Last night Chika was outside a coffee house, on a warm Spring evening, playing a quarter size classical guitar and singing early 1970s American songs accompanied by his bongo drumming friend.

Chika spoke good English, had spent time on Venice beach and traveled much of the world. Chika confirms an earlier thesis I had.

In the late 1970s I built a park for street people in the heart of their neighborhood on 6^th Street in San Francisco.  The park lasted roughly three years before it was closed by social pressure.

I built the park because I got to know a number of street people and concluded that they were mostly people who didn't want to be part of society and had opted out.  I felt they deserved a safe communal park to hang out. 

Puritanism doomed the park. Every political power and every social welfare agency in San Francisco was on my case, daily, demanding that I find work for the people in the park and when they were drunk, I was supposed to get them sober.  It was just a park!

In 1981 the label “homeless” arrived in San Francisco from New York and the park had to be closed because housing was deemed the official problem, not the desire of the street people to opt out of social constraints.

Later, in the mid-1980s, I got to know a few Tokyo street people and they were unambiguous about opting out of social responsibilities, since responsibility weighs heavily here. Every form of social welfare and abundant housing was available to street people in Tokyo in return for meeting social obligations. Their answer was “no.”

Turns out Chika, mentioned in the first paragraph, lives in the nearby Yoyogi Park.  He has an apartment for clothes and showering but he lives year-round in the park and loves his life. Chika is a musician and actor and works when the jobs are appealing.

I would guess that several hundred people live in tents in Yoyogi Park and several thousand more in other large Tokyo parks. Japanese are not Puritan so there seems to be no pressure to drive the outcasts out of the parks.  The outcasts are required to keep their areas clean, keep their tents safe and not to beg.

Where does Puritanism come from?  I find it in desert people all over the middle east and it appears to arrive among northern Europeans by 1000 CE (from my reading of the saga of Erik the Red.)