Preface and Acknowledgements

My first encounter with homelessness took place in Tokyo. A domestic economic crisis that had begun in 1992 was striking the population hard. In 1997, big firms and banks suddenly started to collapse. Japan was sliding into a double-dip recession. I entered university that same year, and to get there I travelled via big railway stations such as Shinjuku and Tokyo. On each journey, I witnessed sites of homelessness encroaching deeper and deeper into spaces of public transportation, like water endlessly springing up and soaking the ground. The scenes lingered in my heart.

I found a group of homelessness activists on the internet and started to get involved. It only took a short while before I knew that this small group was the most radical organisation for homelessness in Japan, seeking to free up for roofless people every park and alley of Tokyo's Shibuya Ward. My task in the group was relatively modest: to engage in frequent visits to homeless sites, to distribute meals to homeless people, to sell secondhand clothes at flea markets with homeless youths, and to take part in street demonstrations. This first encounter lasted three years, and the experience taught me how intolerant public spaces can be for people without housing.

The second encounter took place in Kanagawa Prefecture, just south of Tokyo. This place left me with more colourful memories. In Tokyo, I was struggling to adapt to the worlds of homelessness and activism and the tense political situations that surrounded them. In Kanagawa, I had already finished my "socialisation" into the street-level worlds of homelessness and had decided to conduct social research and fieldwork on these worlds. In Tokyo, a lack of clarity about this issue had given me, an undergrad student, somewhat uncertain feelings. In Kanagawa, I was a graduate student, and more forward looking. I worked with different local groups but most frequently took part in groups in two cities, Yokohama and Hiratsuka. The timing was definitive because it was the moment when, for the first time in history, the Japanese state was stepping up its regulation of homelessness. Under the state's vigorous intervention, the hidden "structure" of homelessness, regulation, and activism was becoming apparent.

Tokyo and Kanagawa, two sites of my unusual urban encounters, form the ontological basis of my research, though only Kanagawa Prefecture provides conjunctural information for this book. Using the same site of fieldwork, in fact, I published a book in Japanese in 2014. This work won an important prize and is considered a unique contribution to the study of urban poverty, social movements, homelessness, and the day labourer population in Japan. All along, my work on homelessness has had a core claim and a specific attribute. Foremost has been the assertion that homelessness can be conceptualised in terms of labour-mediated relations of deprived people to urban nature, of metabolic processes of production and consumption in public spaces, which provoke "normal" (domiciled) society to intervene into the spaces of homelessness. A specific attribute of my work has been a thorough depiction of the long-term history of social movements for homeless people and day labourers in Yokohama's Kotobuki district and its outskirt areas, which researchers previously had not entirely depicted.

Though my Japanese-language book was successful, I was motivated to write an original book in English, an ambition prompted by Neil Brenner. After publication of the Japanese book in 2014, I started to think deeply about how I could write things differently. Writing a useful scholarly book in English demanded that I construct a comprehensive theoretical and methodological framework that could deliver my message to international audiences. The task was to create a new, large-scale research programme with theoretical rigour and methodological clarity, logically linking various dimensions of my materials and observations. This must guide my narrative for international readers in an intelligible and attractive way.

Rescaling Urban Poverty is the outcome of this multifaceted struggle. Compared to my previous efforts, the present book is more theoretically and methodologically sophisticated, more conscious of the meanings of regulationist and critical literature on the issue of "homelessness plus Japan". The book was created around a carefully woven network of Lefebvrian, Gramscian, Harveyan, and other Marxian concepts. New materials are used widely, and old information is reexamined. For better or worse, throughout the process of production, I was almost completely confined to one unimpressive area of Japan that is remote from centres of Japan's national dynamics. I believed that this confined status would be very productive and that it might help my creative endeavour to reach international audiences beyond local milieus.

In this struggle, my companion was Antonio Gramsci's Prison Notebooks, rather than other, canonical texts. Gramsci gleaned many new ideas from his famous experience of "being enclosed". This reflection of my own situation onto the work of the canonical author now looks far more naive and indefensible than it seemed at the time. The truth is that I needed this and other myths to maintain my morale during the extended period of this book's preparation and writing. In the late days of the writing, someone who shared time with me in New York City made me aware of the city's old poets, and their works were quickly added to my bookshelf's mythmaking section.

I hope that a variety of readers will find this book interesting. While the book commits to particular strands of critical urban and capitalism studies, my intention is to make its core debates interesting and intelligible to various kinds of reader-including those who are not very familiar with these discourses. I believe that the modes of argumentation employed here are useful for many audiences who are interested in issues related to policy, poverty, social movements, and the (re)scaling dynamism of state/urban space.

My special thanks go to Neil Brenner, who has given me limitlessly generous support since we met. At the departments of Sociology and Social and Cultural Analysis at New York University, where I conducted research as a visiting scholar, he completely internationalised my scope and persuaded me to write for an English audience. I hope I can now demonstrate that Neil's long-lasting commitment to me-as a researcher and as a person-was not misplaced. Nik Theodore reminded me that I should create, and not just use, theory, and his words have affected the form of this book. David Fasenfest powerfully encouraged me to complete this project during the final few years of the writing by locating my scholarship in active networks of international scholars.

My research has been helped by many scholars in Japan, including Yukihiko Kitagawa, Tan'no Kiyoto, Takashi Machimura, Masao Maruyama, and Akihiko Nishizawa. I remember how generously Yoshiharu Kishi, a teacher of modern German literature, made time for me-someone who had just entered university. At his cosy office, we read classics, with an intention to nurture my ability to read text as text, which Kishi thought to be the only way to "intellectualise" what he called my "turbulent" (sozoshi) world, a world that was being saturated by Tokyo's not-so-cosy politics. I am greatful to Kazushi Tamano, an urbanist with whom I started the earliest version of this project when I was an undergrad. Communication with him has inspired my interest in Japanese urban policy and its historical background.

The sustained enthusiasm that Chih Yuan Woon, Ruth Craggs, and David Featherstone-the present and past editors of the RGS-IBG Book Series-have shown for this project in the past several years has incited me to broaden the readership and intellectual basis of this book. I am grateful for anonymous reviewers' feedback and for the assistance of Durgadevi Shanmugasundaram, Kilmeny MacBride, Giles Flitney, and Todd Manza who helped me with the final processes of this publication. I appreciate the financial support provided by the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science (KAKENHI JP21K01931 and JP22H00909).

I deeply thank activists working in and outside of the Kotobuki district. These spirited and thoughtful people have stood with homeless people despite the sometimes difficult consequences of their actions. There were times when mere "compassion" for homeless people could result in difficult relations with municipal workers, security staff, service providers, or local communities. The activists did not preclude collaboration with them. They would, however, emphatically defend homeless people's survival milieus in public spaces when the "regulators" aspired to flatten these appropriated spaces of homeless people.

This book fundamentally develops arguments that appeared in my previous publications. These include the following:

Theorizing regulation-in-city for homeless people's subaltern strategy and informality: societalization, metabolism, and classes with(out) housing. Critical Sociology 48 (2): 323-339. [2022; Chapter 1]

Times and spaces of homeless regulation in Japan, 1950s-2000s: historical and contemporary analysis. International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 37 (4): 1181-1212. [2013; Chapter 3]

Toshikukan ni sumikomu nojukusha: 'tsukaeru jimen' eno shin'nyu to...