Japanese Court Rules City Park Tent Qualifies As 'Home Address'

The Osaka District Court ruled Friday that a homeless man's tent in a city park should have been accepted as his home address when he submitted details of his new abode to a ward office. Yuji Yamauchi, 55, had filed an administrative lawsuit seeking to overturn the refusal of Osaka's Kita Ward office to accept his report of setting up residence in the ward's Ogimachi Park.Homeless tent in Osaka JapanIn the decision, Presiding Judge Tomoichiro Nishikawa said, "The tent has the deepest relationship with the plaintiff's life and it is illegal not to accept his report of moving to that address." Homeless people have long been denied public benefits because they could not specify a home address. Friday's ruling, however, could enable many of them to receive health insurance, unemployment payments and other public services. According to the ruling, Yamauchi moved out of a Sumiyoshi Ward dormitory that was operated by a pachinko parlor around 1998 or 1999. He set up the tent in Ogimachi Park in 2000 and has lived there ever since. In March 2004, Yamauchi filed the report about his new address with the Kita Ward office. Ward officials, however, rejected the report, saying the tent did not qualify as a residence because it would interfere with the appropriate use of the park. In establishing that the tent was in fact Yamauchi's home address, the district court pointed to the basic resident register law's definition of an individual's address as the "center of that individual's entire life and that which has the deepest relationship with that individual's life." The court ruled that from an objective standpoint "the plaintiff's tent provided the substance as the base of his life." As evidence, the court pointed to the fact that the tent was used by Yamauchi as a dining and living room and that he left the tent each day to work as a day laborer. The court also noted that lumber and plywood had been assembled around the tent, along with pegs nailed into the four corners of the tent to secure it in place. The Kita Ward office argued that the tent was only a temporary shelter that would eventually be removed because Yamauchi had no ownership rights over the land on which the tent was set up. The district court, however, said the ward office could not reject Yamauchi's report of moving into the park simply because he did not possess ownership rights over the land.According to a survey by the Ministry of Health, Welfare and Labor, there were about 25,300 homeless in the nation in 2003, including 6,600 based in Osaka.