Offering Help & Hope
How can decluttering your closet help Tokyo’s most vulnerable? INTOUCH finds out.
Tadashige Fujiwara cups his hands as if peering into a crystal ball and flexes his thick fingers, worn smooth like the concrete blocks he once cemented to the Beppu Bay shoreline. Skin eroded by backbreaking hardship, debt, homelessness and near death.
Pulling up a chair in the offices of the Salvation Army Japan headquarters in Jimbocho, Fujiwara, who could pass for a retired prizefighter, smiles broadly. Staff gravitate to him, joking about how intimidating he looked when he first arrived at a Salvation Army church 10 years ago. One calls the burly 74-year-old a “superhero.”
“When I think about my life, there was a time where I wasn’t helpful to anybody,” says Fujiwara. “Now being part of that, and to be able to be of use to somebody, it is a great feeling to have.”
The Salvation Army is a quasi-military Protestant Christian charity that helps the destitute and those who have fallen on hard times. Founded in London in 1865, the organization has more than 1.6 million members worldwide, including 3,000 in Japan.
The group is financed through donations, government funding and its thrift shops that sell donated items. The Club’s Women’s Group holds an annual drive for the Salvation Army’s bazaars in Suginami and Koto wards. For decades, Members have been donating clothes, toys, kitchenware, linens and other household items.
The charity shops are mostly staffed by those benefiting from the Salvation Army’s rehabilitation and treatment programs. “The work gives them a reason to live a healthy life and brings them a sense of gratification,” says Women’s Group member Isako Sekiguchi, who has volunteered with the drive for the past decade. “And it provides them a place where they belong, which is important for everyone.”
British Salvation Army officers arrived in Yokohama in 1895, and an original 1907 photograph of their first Japanese convert, Gunpei Yamamuro, seated alongside Salvation Army founder William Booth and former Prime Minister Shigenobu Okuma, hangs in the office of Colonel Kenneth Maynor, the head of the Salvation Army in Japan.
Also hanging on his wall is a rare, Edo-era fumie stone, a reminder of Japan’s uneasy relationship with early Christian missionaries, when suspected believers were forced to trample on holy images or face execution.
Maynor, an Ohio native, lives at the Salvation Army’s compound in Suginami, next door to a children’s home, where he sometimes plays with the toddlers and lines up alongside the older kids for games of basketball. Nearby is the 100-year-old Booth Memorial Hospital, home to Japan’s first ambulance. An alcohol treatment center, senior homes, shelters for women and men and a community center, where English, music and cooking classes are taught, are also in the area.
“Every night, I would say, there are thousands of people in Japan sleeping under a Salvation Army roof. Every day there are thousands that are receiving a meal from the Salvation Army,” says Maynor. “A lot of people don’t realize that the Salvation Army has a large impression in the country.”
Fujiwara learned about the organization while living in a park near Tokyo Station. Volunteers distributed meals, clothes, blankets and other necessities to the homeless there.
Fujiwara’s story is a common one among the city’s hordes of homeless. The son of a sailor, he grew up in a small fishing village on Shikoku’s west coast, where he was expelled from school for fighting and stealing fruit from orchards.
His first substantial job was as a diver building breakwaters along the Oita coast in Kyushu. A back injury forced him to quit at age 33, and to support his wife and two sons, he set up a small construction firm with a friend. It was an itinerant life of hotels, booze-soaked nights and gambling. He made ¥1 million a month, but his family saw only a fraction of that. Work finally dried up in the 1990s, followed by his marriage.
“There was no family to go back to, so I had no motivation to work anymore,” Fujiwara says. “That’s how I became homeless in the end.” For a month, Fujiwara slept in Tokyo Station, before moving to nearby Tokiwabashi Park. There, he lived in a makeshift shelter of empty crates and blue tarpaulin for four years. For work, he unloaded trucks and did other odd jobs.
It was a heart problem that proved to be his way out. After severe chest pains landed him in the hospital, he recuperated for three months at the Salvation Army’s men’s hostel in Suginami.
“He’s a rough, tough guy who was this close to the grave, and here he is now, one of our volunteers,” says Maynor. “The Salvation Army not only provides a safe place, but a healthy place for [people] to experience love, dignity, respect and hope. When people donate to the Salvation Army furniture or clothing or yen, the money does not go to enormous salaries. It goes to this mission.”
The Salvation Army in Japan employs more than 1,100 staff at over 20 treatment and care facilities, including the hostel where Fujiwara recovered.
Fujiwara says that his life took a turn while he was living under a bridge in the park, not far from the sprawling grounds of the Imperial Palace. He started attending the weekly Sunday service at the nearby Salvation Army church. When he couldn’t go, one of the church members, an amputee named Sentaro Hosomi, would visit Fujiwara at his lean-to.
“I was so touched by it,” says Fujiwara. “That somebody would give this kind of care to me. I didn’t want to betray that. I wanted to respond to that.”
After Fujiwara recovered from his heart attack, he moved into a government-subsidized, one-room apartment where he remains today. In 2015, he underwent bypass surgery.
“Because I am quite stubborn, I will do things until I drop dead,” he says. “I didn’t really want to be cared for by the government. I wanted to earn my own living and find a place to live, but my body, my physical condition, wasn’t very good anymore. It’s much better now. I can move my fingers.”
Obstinately ignoring official advice to forego work, Fujiwara volunteers for the Salvation Army, delivering hot meals and other food to those with whom he shares a history.
Fujiwara has also reconnected with his elder son (he doesn’t know where his other son lives), and he hopes to visit him and his three grandkids in Kyushu.
“I have hurt people enough,” he says. “I want to do good instead.”
Salvation Army Charity Drive
May 26 | 9–11:30am & 2–3:30pm
Words: Nick Narigon
Image: Cédric Diradourian
