Everyday life invents itself by poaching in countless ways on the property of others. (Michel de Certeau, 1984)

The title, Midori, is the Japanese word for green, and refers literally to the colour green and in this context, the western concept of 'the green' or leisure area within a city. This work explores how nature can be the staging point for defence against the reduction to 'bare life'. The natural biotic green spaces of Tokyo serve as a rallying point of the self-constructed homeless communities of Tokyo. These spaces are, by their very nature, owned by everyone and no-one at the same time. This is the basis for appropriation as an act highlighting the lack of support by government and thus indirectly by the rest of society. This has been assessed by the local Tokyo government as a threat to the disciplinary control that they exercise over this space.

Objects are the glue that hold society together. Everyday social practices can be seen through objects and things that transform a 'place' from 'space', through their ability to be organized and fixed in a location. Objects and humans work together to achieve the creation and maintenance of 'place' that can be political as it is physical.

These sites have been used as a political resources in the defence of 'the right to proper life' in order to raise questions surrounding the existence of the homeless communities in Tokyo. This is achieved by the subtle confrontations enacted by bodies and objects that disrupt the somatic norm of the green space as a leisure space. These tactics of resistance necessitate a combination of visibility and invisibility, in order create and maintain a platform to make visible the process of reduction to 'bare life' to the wider society. These practices of the homeless community are constantly changing shape and intensity to invent opportunities in order to escape and evade this reductive process. As global capitalism is ephemeral and marked by contingency, so too these material constructions have been shaped by the long economic depression from which Japan is slowing recovering.