It’s early morning in Tokyo, only a few years ago, and a large number of homeless people are lining up outside a building in the city’s trendy Harajuku neighborhood.
They aren’t waiting for food bank donations or medical checkups, or to apply for welfare. They are standing in line to buy the latest limited-edition Nike sneakers from a boutique store.
"Some customers were paying homeless people or students to line up outside stores for them," says Hirofumi Kojima, director of sneaker store Atmos. "Now, we check people's ID to make sure they don't do that. And we have a dress code, so you're not allowed to line up unless you're wearing a particular type of sneaker. Before we started doing that, you would get hundreds of homeless people lining up on the street."