Yokohama Street Life The Precarious Career of a Japanese Day Laborer is a oneman 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 selfeducated philosopher whose thoughts on life in the slums on postwar 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 longterm career in a settled workplace.