If you are a documentary filmmaker, one surefire way to impress viewers is to expose some aspect of your chosen subject that conventional reporting chooses to ignore.
That's the approach that Swedish videographer Simon Klose decided to take when he packed his camera and flew to Japan early last year to shoot a documentary about the last thing most Swedes would associate with this affluent and reputedly harmonious nation: homelessness.
The choice of theme for his film -- working title "You are Here" -- may seem odd for someone whose most recent outings were an ad for Ikea and an MTV Nordic hip-hop video, in which Klose's buddy Timbuktu raps in a southern-Swedish drawl.
Sober reportage
But Klose, 29, also has passion for sober reportage and, having lived in Nagoya during his early teens, he felt the urge to share a little-known aspect of this home away from home with his fellow countrymen.
"Young Swedes have a very fashionable view of Japan," said Klose, who, with a shock of blond hair and tattoo on his arm, happens to be pretty fashionable himself. "Japan is a hip place where you get your latest limited sneakers and 12-inch house-music records. But Swedes know nothing about the homelessness situation. That's what I want to do with this film: show another side of Japan in 2005."
To residents of Japan, of course, it comes as no surprise that there are people living in parks or on the street. A government study in early 2003 found that some 25,000 people around the country were homeless. They are largely the victims of bankruptcies and downsizing triggered by the 1991 implosion of the economic bubble, and both officials and academics quietly hint that the number has risen since what was the government's only post-bubble homelessness study.
In Osaka and Tokyo -- with Japan's largest concentration of homeless -- tent dwellers have vacated some of the largest shanty-town encampments once found in parks, making it appear the problem is being dealt with effectively.
But advocates for the homeless -- including Klose -- say they have disappeared from the two cities' most popular strolling spots mainly because municipal authorities have chased them away and, lacking any meaningful support from the government, the homeless have only spread out among smaller parks.
That this has occurred in the world's second largest economy could easily baffle observers from Sweden, a country renowned for the vastness of its social safety net.
"From my point of view, it's a strange way of dealing with social issues in a country that's opulent -- basically trying to kick homeless people out of the parks, with few alternatives to re-enter society," said Klose.
To explore the problem at street level, Klose conducted extensive interviews with three destitute men camping out in parks around Tokyo -- an ex-yakuza, an unemployed carpenter and a former truck driver -- listening as they recounted their lives for hours on end while the Panasonic DVX100A camera hummed away on its tripod.
As every journalist knows, unfettered access to a source doesn't come easily -- even if you speak their tongue as fluently as Klose does. And that is particularly true when the source has a checkered past. So Klose had to ease his way into the mens' lives, sharing bento lunch boxes and bottles of cheap liquor (mostly his treat) to earn trust -- all the while struggling to stay sober enough to keep track of his camera's aperture and sound settings.
Not to say it was all a chore. There were brighter episodes, for example watching samurai movies with the ex-yakuza in an all-night theater, while an elderly, cross-dressing prostitute serviced a customer a few seats away.
And even those cold February weeks spent living with ex-trucker Yoshihisa Watabe in Toyama Park, Shinjuku Ward, had their moments. As Klose huddled on a large sheet of cardboard -- wrapped in blankets lent by his host, his shoes removed in accordance with Japanese custom -- 41-year-old Watabe regaled him with colorful memories of street fights past before the two would drift off to sleep beneath the falling snow.
Directly beneath the falling snow, that is, for Watabe doesn't own a tent. "I almost froze my balls off," Klose remarked in idiomatically precise American slang.
Chilling in a whole different way, though, was a passing encounter with a homeless man (not among the documentary's main subjects) who told Klose about trying in vain to commit suicide by slitting his wrists, saying the next time he would get it right by jumping from a roof. And Klose, added the man gravely, was welcome to get it all on film. "It was really a scary interview for me," he confessed.
Deathly encounter
But worst of all was when the filmmaker finally did encounter death.
One day in mid-May, Klose went to tape the aging carpenter, who went by the nickname Vitamin D, only to find him there, dead. The police, said Klose, were unwilling to have an autopsy performed, having concluded that Vitamin D had probably died of one of his many illnesses.
Vitamin D may have sensed his number was coming up. During a taping session only months earlier inside the candlelit tent where he lived for eight years near Tokyo City Hall, the homeless man had remarked, "This, too, is a life. Until I die."
The filming of such tragedies behind him, Klose is now back in Sweden, where he and editor/co-director Svante Loden must whittle 180 hours of video -- comprising a confusing array of Japanese dialects, much of them drunkenly slurred -- to the neat, 58-minute package they will submit to their sponsor, Sveriges Television's (Swedish Television) Channel 1, for broadcast in the summer of 2006.
It is shaping up to be a nightmare. Klose will get off to a late start after returning next month from a trip to Spain with his girlfriend, a medical-school student. And there is the added challenge of translating all the monologues into Swedish for Loden, a demanding perfectionist who, alas, speaks not a lick of Japanese.
Just eyeing all the tapes spread across Klose's bedroom floor in the southern Swedish city of Skane would discourage a lesser filmmaker. "I guess you could lay it out and build a bridge to Copenhagen," jokes Klose. "It's a lot of tapes." Klose estimates that he and Loden will spend eight hours a day over more than six months to complete the task.
If everything goes according to plan, though, the duo will see their work broadcast not only in Sweden, but across the rest of the world -- including at France's Cannes Film Festival and the Sundance Film Festival in Utah, where Klose will submit the piece at a slightly longer length.
Still, he seems more intent on getting back to Japan to show the documentary to the homeless men who laid bare their troubled lives before his lens. "I believe the world can be changed through storytelling, in this case through stories from the bottom of Japan's consumption society," said Klose.
"The film wants to convey the old truth that marginalized people are no less human beings than others and, in the process, remold the imagery of contemporary Japan."
