Yokohama's Ishikawacho Station straddles the border between two worlds. Take a right turn from its south exit and you find yourself among the designer boutiques and Belgian chocolate shops of tourist Motomachi. Head left from the same station, however, walk three minutes and you discover a neighborhood omitted from most guidebooks — except perhaps as a warning in the "Dangers & Annoyances" section. This 200- by 300-meter district is called Kotobukicho, "The Town of Congratulations," and it's home to Japan's third-largest community of day laborers — the closest Yokohama has to a slum.

Visiting Kotobukicho on a glorious summer morning, I'm immediately struck by the palette of its low-rise buildings and pot-holed roads — gray, black and six shades of brown, it's an area devoid of primary colors. In a nation where it's normal to find three competing convenience stores on a single street, here there are none. Nor are there any fast food restaurants, banks or any other of the brightly lit signs of 21st century Japan. The only shops are small groceries stocked with dusty shelves of canned food alongside refrigerators piled high with shiny tins of alcohol.

Drinking appears to play an important part in the lives of many of Kotobukicho's residents. It's 10 a.m., but on every corner men sit alone and in groups sharing bottles of spirits and cans of cut-price beer. Three pensioners in wheelchairs clutch huge cartons of sake protectively to their chests as they push themselves one-handed down the road. Ninety-five percent of Kotobukicho's residents are single men, and over half of them are over the age of 60. Theirs is a precarious existence: Hired by the day to work the docks or building sites, they sleep in nightly-rented rooms, never more than an injury or bout of sickness away from homelessness.