My
name is Yukio Tanaka and I'm 55 years old. I live
near Umeda Station in Osaka. In winter I sleep in
different places - I find a place out of the wind, then make a little shelter
out of cardboard boxes and go to sleep. People think
that I'm lazy but that isn't true; I think that I'm just unlucky. I
grew up in a small town in Kyushu and moved to Osaka 20 years ago - it was easy
to find a job and make money then. I didn't have any
special training but I found a job in an electronics company, working in a factory
making radios. I never married and I rented a room
not far from where I worked. Anyway, the economic
slowdown came, the factory closed and 200 of us lost our jobs. At
first I thought that it would be easy to find a job, but I soon found that things
weren't so easy anymore. I didn't have much money
in the bank and soon I couldn't pay the rent and had to move into a hostel. To
save money, a few of us started sleeping on the sidewalk in summer and now we
sleep outside all the time. People say that soon there
will be a lot more people like me living on the streets. | 
