Harlem-Style Cleanup Is Osaka’s Task as Casino Beckons By Shigeru Sato May 22, 2014 8:01 AM GMT+0900
Used syringes litter the streets. The air reeks of urine. Homeless men wander the sidewalks.
The central Airin district of Osaka is suffering the ravages of deindustrialization. The home of Panasonic Corp. and Sharp Corp. has turned into Japan’s most crime-ridden metropolis.
Leaders of the country’s third-biggest city are beginning to fight back, drawing inspiration from New York City’s experience of improving public safety as the first step in a turnaround. Prefectural Governor Ichiro Matsui led a delegation to Manhattan last year to study urban development and education.
“Harlem in New York has changed and now bustles with people,” Matsui, 50, said in an e-mail. “Airin has to be reborn like Harlem, and stamping out drug dealing is one of the things we must do.”
While the urban dysfunction that has plagued the U.S. and Europe is largely absent in Japan, it’s bad enough in downtown Osaka to get residents riled up. A petition submitted to local leaders in December, complete with photos of used syringes discovered near a school -- including one in a six-year-old’s bicycle basket -- resulted in the installation of 30 security cameras, 160 new street lights, and a renewed commitment to crack down on drug dealing.
Cleaning up is important because Matsui and Mayor Toru Hashimoto have made tourism, and attracting Japan’s first casino, the centerpiece of a redevelopment plan.
Job Losses
The loss of 416,000 jobs in the prefecture since 1995 has fallen particularly hard on Airin, which had a skid row even when times were good. It was also the site of four days of riots and disturbances over police corruption in 1990.
The area was a once-bustling hub for the day laborers who thrived during the post-World War II boom. They worked at construction sites and bedded down at cheap hostels that dotted the area. Their numbers peaked at about 1.9 million in 1989, the peak of Japan’s bubble economy, and have since fallen to about 300,000, according to Inclusive City Net, a local research institute.
Osaka’s prosperity dates back 14 centuries when the then-emperor settled in the city. The capital subsequently moved to Nara and Kyoto, neighboring cities that are now tourist destinations with a slew of temples.
Osaka remains the core of Asia’s third-biggest metropolitan economic region after Tokyo and the Seoul-Incheon area in South Korea, according to figures compiled by the Brookings Institution in 2012. The Osaka-Kobe area, with a population of 18.6 million, had economic output of $655 billion, larger than Switzerland’s. This year, Japan’s tallest skyscraper, Abeno Harukas, opened less than a mile from Airin.
