For 70-year-old Mikami, winter life on the streets of Tokyo has become so unbearable that flirting with a suicide fantasy has become his favorite pastime.

"I want a job, I love working," he said feebly, adding that the last time he landed a job was five years ago when he spent one night cleaning an office building, and only because another person could not work that night.

His plea is readily echoed by hundreds of clench-fisted "comrades" in the Sanya district of northeastern Tokyo.

Once an area that teemed with cheap inns and watering holes catering to rough and rowdy day laborers, Sanya is rapidly becoming a gathering place for the homeless as the economic slump continues to put aging workers out on the street.

On one typical January morning, dozens of men crowded into the dingy lobby of the Sanya Labor Center around 6 a.m. only to find four job offers. Still, it was an improvement from the zero offers of the previous day.

"We are verbally abused (by disappointed job-seekers) every morning, like 'How can you eat when you cannot find us work!' " center director Masao Yamaguchi said.

While there were more than 300 job offers a day during the peak of the bubble economy of the late 1980s, center officials said on average they could secure less than 20 a day last month.

"During the bubble economy, we were scolded by employers because we were not introducing enough employee prospects to them. Now, we are scolded by job-seekers because we are not introducing enough jobs to them," Yamaguchi said with a sigh.

Toshio Goto, 47, who came to Sanya eight years ago and has lived on the street for two years, said, "Things were OK until two years ago, because we had (work related to) the Nagano (Olympic Games). But now, I can only find work one day a week at best. Anyway, they don't hire people over 45, so what can I do?"

Sanya, the unofficial name for a 1.6-sq.-km area straddling Arakawa and Taito wards, developed after World War II as a coolie town that supplied the nation's rebuilding efforts with a flexible source of day laborers.

Sanya's vigor peaked in 1964, the year of the Tokyo Olympics. At the time, about 15,000 day laborers commuted to work sites from the area's 222 "doya," or flophouses. The average age of these workers was 40.

Anecdotes about the rowdiness of the district's men in those days are abundant -- on sweltering nights, drunk laborers filled the streets and a brush as innocent as eye contact could spark a deadly fight.

Sanya earned a notorious reputation nationwide during this period, when many riots and skirmishes with police took place.

The fate of the area and its denizens took a sharp downturn after the oil crisis rocked the nation in 1973. The burst of the bubble economy dealt the final blow, as the construction industry, the biggest employer of these laborers, increasingly shifted operations to machines and cheap foreign labor.

Little work for Sanya's homeless means little business in the district. Today, the number of doya has fallen to 182 and only about 5,000 people stay in them. Of these, 2,200 are welfare recipients and their average age has topped 60.

"This place used to be full by 5 p.m.," said an owner of a local tavern, adding that sales have declined to one-third of what they were in Sanya's heyday.

"Some drank from morning. People were very rich back then, and they did not have to go to work every day."

A symbolic event occurred last summer when a corner bar, which had long been a popular hangout for Sanya workers, was replaced with a convenience store employing student part-timers.

Locals say the changing of the times has sapped the energy of the once-belligerent town. "There used to be a lot of fights among lodgers," said a doya owner, telling a story in which one lodger fatally stabbed another in front of the entrance hall. "It's gotten quiet now."

Officials at the Johoku Welfare Center agree. In days of old, they reminisced, hot-tempered workers often jumped up on desks to grab counselors. "People who come here have become a lot more understanding," center staffer Kunio Nozaki said.

And the problems center officials face have also changed, he added. While the center's main job used to be offering advice and help for day laborers who were temporarily out of work, officials today are busy handling more urgent needs of the homeless.

"We used to take time and sit with those guys, talking about what they should do with their lives. But now we are so busy distributing food that we don't have time to talk," Nozaki said, adding that about 300 people queue every morning to receive a loaf of white bread and a small carton of milk.

The number of homeless in Sanya, while once "rare cases," has shot up to around 2,000. Their average age is not readily available, but many are apparently too old for physically demanding day labor. And even those who are relatively young often have to give up job offers, if any, as street life has taxed their strength.

While Sanya never had a good health record, it is seeing health problems worsen as many residents have become older and homeless. Officials are especially concerned about the spread of tuberculosis among those who live on the street.

Alarmed by the growing number of homeless in Sanya and other parts of Tokyo, the metropolitan government created 51,000 temporary jobs in the current fiscal year, such as cleaning government-run facilities.

"While it is impossible to eke out a living with those jobs, it is still important for them to work to support themselves," said one metro official.

In addition to tackling the job problem, the city government began a program in November 1997 to fight tuberculosis among Sanya's homeless.

Meanwhile, given the dim prospects of the traditional day labor market, the Sanya Labor Center is considering plans to give the homeless job training in more promising fields.

Currently, center officials are negotiating with authorities to train some homeless to become home helpers for the elderly from fiscal 2001.

Yet, such bureaucratic efforts have come too little, too late, said the homeless Goto, adding he would not be surprised if frustrated homeless vent their anger in a more visible and violent form.

"The central government should take care of us a bit more because it used us plenty during the (construction rush of) the Tokyo Olympic Games, then tossed us out like rags."