ABSTRACT
This chapter examines heterotopias of homelessness in contemporary Japan as an instance of de-fatalizing the present. Inverting dominant understandings of home and homelessness, community and violence, at multiple geographical and political sites, homelessness construed as a heterotopic/heterotemporal site enables a thinking of politics otherwise. Incentives provided by the Government Housing Loan Corporation (GHLC), for instance, targeted middle-class home ownership, with comparatively little assistance for private rental housing or low-income housing. The chapter makes a theoretical case for deploying heterotopia as a heuristic device for analyzing the politics of space-time within the site of homelessness in Japan. Conventionally framed as a social pathology or disaster zone, homelessness is re-figured as a practice of atemporal dwelling that reclaims the social as a domain of empathy and care outside the disciplinary reach of a government of the social. Heterotopias function as counter-sites, Foucault suggests, by bringing together multiple historical periods, incompatible parts of the population, and discordant times in one geographic space.
