Surrounded by bustling downtown streets, shopping malls and high-rises, Kawasaki Station and its vicinity are, on the surface, a paragon of urban development.
Just a short distance away, however, this veneer of prosperity gives way to an eerie quiet that persists in the underbelly of Kawasaki, a former hub for factories and manual laborers with a long history of battling poverty, pollution and racial discrimination.
A walk northward from the station takes one to a notorious riverbank of Tama River, where a 13-year-old schoolboy was viciously slain by a gang of local juveniles on a freezing February night five years ago. Because the ringleader behind the lynching was a Filipino Japanese, the case at the time spotlighted anew the difficulties of fitting in for children with foreign backgrounds. It also gave ammunition to xenophobic rallies that had begun surfacing in Kawasaki a few years before.