Japan's jobless forced to sleep in Internet cafes

It is 6 o'clock on a Thursday night when the casualties of Japan's latest economic collapse start to arrive at the Manga Internet cafe.
They shuffle in like a defeated sports team that only wants to get off the field and forget what just happened. The Manga's customers -- all men, most of them middle-aged -- trundle by, one by one, pay the $9 it costs to rent a computer and a booth for the night, kick off their shoes and collapse into cubicles. Few even bother with the pretense of surfing the Internet before falling asleep in one of the cheap desk chairs that will pass as their bed this evening.
"I heard about it through word of mouth. When you don't have much money, the Internet cafés are the cheapest place where you can spend the night indoors," said Kimiaki Takimoto, a 46-year-old former Nissan Diesel employee who recently spent a stretch living out of another Internet cafe shelter in the same working-class south Tokyo neighborhood as the Manga.
Because they offer customers a roof over their heads, as well as an e-mail connection to the outside world and possible job offers, the cafes are seen as one social step above living on the streets in this, one of the world's most expensive cities. Some cafes have begun embracing their new role as de facto homeless shelters, selling cheap slippers and boil-in-carton noodles in addition to time online.
Even before the world's second-largest economy began its astonishingly rapid slide last fall, the government estimated that there were upwards of 5,000 Japanese who were effectively full-time residents of Internet cafes. Now, staff say, all 80 cubicles at the Manga, one of an estimated 600 cafes around Tokyo, are booked solid on most nights. Many of those bedding down are people like Takimoto, contract workers who lost their jobs in recent weeks and months as the global economic crisis slammed hard into export-reliant Japan.
Because many Japanese companies provide their workers with an apartment or a dormitory room near their factory, many of those put out of work lost their home the same day or soon afterwards. As a result, not only are Tokyo's Internet cafes filled to bursting with the newly unemployed, but informal tent cities have sprouted in many of the capital's otherwise serene parks as well. While most districts of Tokyo still buzz with economic activity, the growing number of unemployed and homeless in the city are just the most obvious sign of a thick malaise that now hangs over what has long been one of the wealthiest and best-functioning societies in the world.
For months now, Japan has been producing an ever-worsening set of macroeconomic figures. On a year-over-year basis, the economy shrank by 12.1 percent in the last three months of 2008, by far the worst hit taken by any major country. Then exports fell a stunning 45.7 percent in January. While the country's unemployment rate, at 4.1 percent, is still relatively low compared with many Western countries, that's historically very high for Japan and some forecast that it could spike up to an unheard of 6 percent, or higher, before the year is over.
More than 150,000 job cuts have been announced since October, including mass layoffs of temporary workers at such flagship companies as Toyota, Sony and Panasonic. Many more full-time staff were forced to take pay cuts and work reduced hours. With almost no one here expecting a recovery in the near term, some observers predict that 2 million more Japanese could be out of work by the end of 2009.
Much of the grim news is expected to arrive at the end of this month, which is the end of the fiscal year for many Japanese companies and the date that also marks the expiry of annual contracts for many of Japan's 19 million contract workers. Economists expect that many companies will tell their temporary employees they can't afford to renew their contracts.

(Distributed by Scripps Howard News Service, www.scrippsnews.com.)
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