Tom Gill – författare

A fascinating exploration of the subculture of Japanese day laborers, whose lives depart radically from the traditions of stability Westerners associate with Japan.Men of Uncertainty presents an unknown side of Japanese society-the world of Japan's day laborers (hiiyatoi rodosha), the urban labor markets where these men gather to find work (yoseba), and the cheap lodging districts where many of them live (doya-gai). Nearly every major Japanese city has a yoseba. These are centers of proletariat culture in the heart of the postindustrial metropolis, similar in many ways to the prewar American skid row. Within these districts, day laborers tend to live outside the two dominant institutions of contemporary Japanese society: the nuclear family and the company.Focusing mainly on the day-laboring district of Yokohama, and with extensive comparative ethnography from five other cities, author Tom Gill finds a society of men who have opted out of the regular, communal way of life. This book details their libertarian, egalitarian lifestyle, oriented to the present yet colored by an awareness that in Japan today being a yoseba man usually means exclusion from mainstream society, absence of family life, and a career that can easily lead to homelessness and an early death on the street.

Growing up as a child of a sharecropper family in South Georgia paints an image of hard times but my memories are just the opposite. We ate three good meals every day and slept in a comfortable bed at night. My parents loved me and taught me a code of conduct that I still strive to live by. I was taught; dont lie, cheat, say ugly words or talk bad about your neighbors. Go to Sunday school on Sunday and stay for church. Say yes sir and no sir to your elders and do not talk with food in your mouth. I was also taught to look people in the eye when talking to them. Daddy said that people with shifty eyes were not trustworthy. When I was assigned to the White House Communications Agency as a Staff Officer during my military career, my upbringing became a source of strength that saw me though some demanding situations. I learned at a very early age that God loved me. When I became a Christian at the age of fifteen, Jesus made sure my very own angel was there to lift me out of numerous deep holes I dug for myself. This book is memories of growing up in the mid forties and fifties and my twenty-three years in the U. S Army. These were challenging times for America and I consider myself fortunate to have lived through the period. World War II was over and millions of military men and women were returning home to pick back up their lives with the same energy and determination that won the war. The world today has changed dramatically from the world I grew up in. We have improved our standard of living with technologic advancements we only dreamed about. However, the world appears to have lost its ethical compass and is digressing back to the moral decay of the Roman Empire period of time. My prayer is that America will once again find its bearing and be a principled compass for the world to follow.

Yokohama Street Life: The Precarious Career of a Japanese Day Laborer is a one-man ethnography, tracing the career of a single Japanese day laborer called Kimitsu, from his wartime childhood in the southern island of Kyushu through a brief military career to a lifetime spent working on the docks and construction sites of Tokyo, Osaka and Yokohama. Kimitsu emerges as a unique voice from the Japanese ghetto, a self-educated philosopher whose thoughts on life in the slums, on post-war Japanese society and on more abstract intellectual concerns are conveyed in a series of conversations with British anthropologist Tom Gill, whose friendship with Kimitsu spans more than two decades. For Kimitsu, as for many of his fellow day laborers at the bottom of Japanese society, offers none of the comforting distractions of marriage, family life, or a long-term career in a settled workplace. It leads him through existential philosophy towards Buddhist mysticism as he fills the time between days of hard manual labor with visits to second-hand bookshops in search of enlightenment.The book also portrays Kimitsu’s living environment, a Yokohama slum district called Kotobuki. Kotobuki is a ‘doya-gai’—a slum inhabited mainly by men, somewhat similar to the skid row districts that used to be common in American cities. Traditionally these men have earned a basic living by working as day laborers, but the decline in employment opportunities has forced many of them into welfare dependence or homelessness. Kimitsu’s life and thought are framed by an account of the changing way of life in Kotobuki, a place that has gradually been transformed from a casual laboring market to a large, shambolical welfare center. In Kotobuki the national Japanese issues of an aging workforce and economic decline set in much earlier than elsewhere, leading to a dramatic illustration of the challenges facing the Japanese welfare state.

Cineas of Athens is a well-educated, hero-worshipping young man. He lives in a world where Alexander the Great's surviving generals battle for kingdoms of their own within Alexander's conquests. Cineas leaves his stodgy family behind and joins the mercenary army of glamorous Demetrius the Besieger at his fortress of Acrocorinth. "e;Three months later,"e; Cineas recalls, "e;I was in Asia...."e;Following the armies there, he fights as a pikeman at the enormous Battle of Ipsus. From there Cineas travels through Syria to Egypt, where he beds a royal princess and joins up with the exiled King Pyrrhus. Pyrrhus is the monarch of the petty kingdom of Epirus on the Adriatic Sea. Pyrrhus aspires to rule the world, too. But, for a generation, it is Cineas who does his best to make that happen. Through battles and intrigues, cavalry charges, assassinations and liaisons, peaceful philosophy and murderous combat across the Ancient World, Cineas follows Pyrrhus' cause loyally. In the end, King Pyrrhus is overwhelmed in defeat. It is left to his last friend Cineas to conduct his funeral rites. Cineas has now, he says, "e;been everywhere and done everything-except talk over our conquests with the King of the World. But then,"e; he concludes, "e;I was always the talker, and Pyrrhus might not really have had that much to say after all