LETTER FROM OSAKA

A chapter of Osaka's history is about to close. The Kamagasaki district, in the south of the major port city, which long housed Japan's largest 'day-labor market,' is now condemned to disappear. Also known as "the district of love and pity," Kamagasaki is a place of profound poverty, where aging laborers too old to be hired, other homeless people from elsewhere, and all kinds of drifters survive – mostly men, with a few women, cast here by the tides of life, few of whom will ever leave.

It is a spectacle of poverty that does not suit the festivities of World Expo 2025, which the city will host starting April 13. In preparation, the municipal government had already ordered the closure of the Airin Labor and Welfare Center in 2019, a symbol of Kamagasaki since its opening in 1970, citing non-compliance with seismic safety standards. The enormous, bleak concrete building housed a hiring office, a dispensary, shabby eateries, and rundown showers. According to Hiroshi Inagaki, president of the day laborers' union, "the center was the gathering place for society's outcasts." During the day, some would sleep under the hiring office's awning after it closed in the early morning, once all job postings had been filled. "The issue of seismic standards is real, but renovations would have been enough to fix the problem. The truth is, the authorities just wanted to get rid of the center," Inagaki said.

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