The Comedian Who Once Lived in a Park

Hiroshi Tamura is a Japanese comedian whose memoir, Homeless Junior High School Student, became one of the best-selling books in Japan in 2007. The Japan Times described it that December as focused on his adolescence, and noted that the book jacket carried an endorsement from the politician Taro Aso, who wrote that it conveyed something Japanese people should never forget. Tamura was 28 at the time.

His mother died when he was 11. Several years later, his father, who had been raising three children alone and was overwhelmed by the responsibility, disappeared. Tamura was then a junior high school student. He lived in a park for a while, until neighbours took him in. The Japan Times does not say how long he stayed in the park or who the neighbours were.

The story was later made into a film, Homeless Chugakusei, directed by Tomoyuki Furumaya, which The Japan Times reviewed in October 2008. In the film the hero, named Hiroshi, is a second-year junior high student at a school in an Osaka suburb. Just before the summer holidays he finds his family's furniture piled outside the door of their apartment. His father, who has got the family evicted, tells his three children to stay strong, declares the family meeting dismissed and cycles away. Hiroshi's older brother and sister do not know where their father is, and Hiroshi tells them he will be fine and leaves with a few belongings. He spends his first night in a nearby park.

The reviews describe the film's version of events, which may differ in detail from Tamura's own account.