Toward the end of his account of what life is like at the bottom of Japan's social structure, Shiro Oyama (a pseudonym) observes that, during his 15 years as a day laborer, he has "never beheld the kind of lofty or beautiful human spirit that people somehow expect to witness at the bottom of society." On the contrary, "I have lost count of the men I have run across who embody a veritable trinity of ignorance, meanness, and arrogance."
On the other hand, he has met many exceptions to this general rule and his account of his laboring life indicates that he is himself one of them. When he looks at what put him at the bottom of the social ladder he realizes that when he was a salaryman he drove himself to conform to life as a company employee. This endeavor revealed "the deep-rooted fear I have of the collective, which compels its members to join in and work with other people."
To escape this, now 40 years old, he dropped, rung after rung, to the depths of San'ya, Tokyo's largest day-laborer quarter, and found that he had, as though instinctively, found "the perfect hiding place . . . a place where someone lacking any vitality whatsoever could go about the business of accommodating his own fecklessness and ill luck."