ABSTRACT
This chapter explores how to overcome the complicity of neoliberal-oriented policies toward homeless people and their supporters or social movements, and ways to seek possible coalitions among radical support groups which build homeless encampments and “Housing First” approaches which are implemented all over the world. These two are contrastive in their approaches, and therefore one may assume it is difficult to explore possible coalitions. However, I argue that both of these practices in Japan entail encountering others in one’s everyday life and may create moments to resist discourses of divided social imaginations toward others. Homeless people have generated small but sufficient friendships with local residents through the contingent encounters triggered by vegetables or a baseball. Meanwhile, former homeless people who received Housing First grants closed the gap between the streets and community by providing their homemade breads in their night patrol activities. Such encounters would also create an alternative approach for us to live with homeless people in urban spaces in contemporary Japan.
