It’s no secret that the Japanese have created a variety of alternate sleeping choices for exhausted inhabitants, given the country’s demand for sleep. Love Hotels, capsule hotels, and manga cafés are popular types of short-term lodging. However, what many people don’t know is that a growing number of Japanese workers live in manga cafés as a long-term solution to their housing problems. In fact, manga cafés have become a sanctuary for officially homeless individuals who seek shelter and a temporary escape from their daily struggles.
However, one very unexpected fact to emerge from the country this year is that manga cafés are considerably less ephemeral than they are designed to be for many people. In reality, a startling number of manga café patrons are long-term, officially homeless inhabitants. Here is the story of Why Do Some Japanese Workers Live in Manga Cafes.
What exactly is a manga cafe?
For starters, unlike a capsule hotel or a love hotel, a manga café may be difficult to understand for non-Japanese. A manga café is a venue where people may pay to stay. It is part waiting room, half library, part inexpensive hotel, and part internet café.
What else you get depends on the sort of room you want, but it usually includes a vast selection of comics (manga), drink services, and private booths. There are booth rooms with only a reclining chair, tatami flooring booths, couch booths, and couples booths.
Reasons people stay temporarily
Though individuals’s motivations differ based on their circumstances, one of the primary reasons people remain at a manga café is to sleep for the night. They’re often furnished with showers and are a low-cost choice for a fast overnight stopover or if you’ve missed the final train. Trains in Japan normally stop running about midnight, and if you don’t reside in the near metropolitan area, taking a cab home might be an expensive choice.
The facts and figures, as well as who lives there
The Tokyo Metropolitan Government recently announced the findings of a manga café study, which provided some fascinating insights into the lives of manga café patrons. According to The Japan Times, the poll was conducted between November 2016 and January 2017 and focused on 502 of Tokyo’s manga cafés that are open 24 hours a day. They questioned 946 of their clients as a result of it. Answers were submitted from 222 cafés that took part in the survey.
According to the report, over 15,000 individuals remain at such cafés each night, with approximately 4,000 of them being officially homeless persons who use these cafés as refuge. People in their 30s and 50s are the most prevalent ‘cyber homeless,’ accounting for 38.5 percent and 27.9 percent, respectively.
The potential reasons people are living more permanently
It has been determined that almost 3,000 of the homeless persons living in cafés do not have steady work, however many are employed on a part-time basis. Many people in their 30s are said to be suffering as a result of the 2008 global financial crisis, while elderly inhabitants struggle to find job due to their senior age.
Renting an apartment in Japan is often associated with significant upfront financial expenditures. Moving fees, deposits, and ‘key money,’ which is a nonrefundable monetary present to the apartment’s landlord (usually equal to one month’s rent), may rapidly mount up to a few thousand dollars, and that’s just to move in. This is one of the most common explanations given by survey respondents for their homelessness.
There is also a difficult scenario for a lot of low-wage Japanese laborers; some make just enough to be exempt from assistance, but not enough to rent a permanent house in Tokyo. 46.8 percent of the 363 café users with no permanent dwelling claimed a monthly income ranging from 110,000 yen to 150,000 yen ($999 – 1362 USD), while the other 10% had no income at all.
Cyberhomelessness is not a new phenomena. The Health, Labor, and Welfare Ministry performed the most recent study on these extremely vulnerable Japanese people in 2007. Since 2007, the projected number of homeless at manga cafés has been 5,400, indicating a decrease. The Tokyo administration has vowed to utilize these figures to inform future policy decisions and to ensure that individuals in need receive the assistance they require.
