Make a film about your own Uber Eats experience! Realistic poverty depicted by a young director

Tokyo Bicycle Festival”, a unique documentary film, is slowly gaining popularity. Since its release at Polepole Higashi Nakano in Tokyo on July 10 this year, the film has been released sequentially in Osaka and Aichi, and in October, the number of theaters has been increasing in Kanagawa, Saitama, and Hyogo.

The film was directed by Taku Aoyagi, 28, who depicted his own personal experience of losing his job in the Covid-19 disaster and becoming a poor man. He went to Tokyo from Yamanashi to work as an Uber Eats driver, and filmed his time there with only simple equipment, mainly filming with a cell phone. What he conveys through his film is the “real poverty of young people living today.

“My annual income was less than one million yen even before Covid-19. My annual income was less than one million yen before Covid-19, but it dropped to zero after Covid-19. Even so, I’m not aware of myself as a poor person at all.

In the midst of the Covid-19 disaster, there have been more opportunities for the media to focus on “poverty among young people. However, Ms. Aoyagi sometimes felt uncomfortable when she saw the superficial reports. He wondered how to convey structural problems to the public, not as straight news. This is also the reason why I took up megaphone filmmaking.

“I believe there are two types of poverty: financial poverty and spiritual poverty. One is financial poverty, and the other is mental poverty. The other is mental poverty. The two overlap more often than not in Japan today, but I think we should separate the two. I am fortunate to be able to do what I want to do, and although I certainly don’t have a lot of money, I am aware that I am spiritually rich.

So I don’t like to think of myself as a poor person. Rather, I think of this situation as a story and take it positively. I don’t know if it’s right to put such a person in the category of poor. But if that’s how the world sees me, I chose to take advantage of the situation and appeal to the world through images.

Born the youngest of three children in the town of Ichikawa Misato in Yamanashi Prefecture, Aoyagi went on to study at the Japan Academy of Moving Images. However, when his father became ill, the family’s financial situation became difficult. During his college years, he managed to graduate with a 5.5 million yen scholarship, but was forced to take a year off from school, spending all his time working part-time to raise money for tuition.

Originally, he majored in fiction film, but changed his field to documentary midway through his studies. When I asked him why, he recalled that he had despaired of his lack of talent while in school.

I realized how boring my scripts were compared to my classmates,” he said. I realized how boring my scripts were compared to my classmates. But with documentaries, I thought that if the subject matter was interesting, I could make up for my lack of talent.

He became a commercial director at the age of 23, but Aoyagi recalls that this honor may have caused him to fall into poverty.

Although he was offered a job at a film-related company, he was so busy preparing for the release of his film that he had no time to look for a job. After graduation, he returned to his parents’ house in Yamagata and worked irregularly at a part-time job as a driver’s agent and at an izakaya (Japanese pub), while taking occasional one-off video jobs. However, due to the new coronavirus, all of these jobs were cut to zero.

A documentary film about people struggling to repay their scholarships and his own attempt to do so on a tuna fishing boat was in the works, but the Covid-19 stopped the project. There was no work at all in my hometown. As a last resort, he came up with the idea of working as a migrant Uber Eats driver to make ends meet.

I had read in the news that Uber Eats drivers could make a lot of money, but the reality was harsh. In the beginning, I drove 10 hours a day for more than 50 kilometers and earned only 7,600 yen. As I got used to it, I was able to earn about 10,000 yen, but it was not a good job. Around April last year, freelancers and teleworkers who had lost their jobs began to pour into the delivery service. The competition intensified and the income decreased. Nevertheless, Mr. Aoyagi says, “I was addicted to it, and at least I was making money.

“To put it simply, it’s like a real smartphone game. There is a system of “quests” where you earn more money by completing a set number of deliveries, and you can’t get out of the swamp of one more delivery and one more delivery. Above all, it’s easy to do with just a smartphone, and the money comes in quickly, so I’ve become addicted to it. However, there is no compensation in the event of an accident, and everything is at your own risk. In essence, there is no risk on the part of Uber, and the drivers are being exploited and manipulated.

But people who are aware of this probably don’t do Uber Eats. It’s convenient and a business that fits the times, but there was also a fear that if this kind of system took root, it would create a distance between people and create loneliness, which in turn would lead to poverty. So I wanted to show through my own experience how we can dance instead of being made to dance.

In Tokyo, without the money to rent a room, she went from one friend’s house to another, sometimes sleeping on the streets or in internet cafes and private video stores in Kabukicho. He sometimes slept on the streets or in Internet cafes and private video stores in Kabukicho, which he felt was a microcosm of modern society.

“I thought about getting a soup kitchen, but my self-esteem got the better of me at the end and I couldn’t take it. At the time, there was an initiative in which private video rooms offered all-you-can-eat beef bowls and curry for 100 yen per 30 minutes. This became quite a lifeline for me. Young people and uncles lined up and silently ate the beef bowl and curry before leaving. The funny thing was that no one said ‘thank you’ because they were aware that they were paying 100 yen. But when I went to the park where the soup kitchen was located, there were no young people there. It was also interesting to see such a clear line of demarcation.

The video was mainly shot with his own iPhone. Since this is a self-documentary work, he referred to the filming methods of Youtubers who often take selfies. It also contains Aoyagi’s own message.

“When I was driving around Tokyo as an Uber Eats driver, I noticed that everywhere I turned, there was a reflection of earnestness. In Shibuya and Shinjuku, there are announcements saying, ‘Don’t tout,’ even when no one is around. In Shibuya and Shinjuku, there is an announcement that says, “Quit touting,” even though there is no one there, and in Tokyo, there is a crowded train running where Governor Koike is talking on the aurora vision, saying, “Avoid the dense streets.

It is precisely because of this era that the way young people interact with society has changed, and even a young man like me can express himself with just an iPhone. YouTube is a perfect example of this. If you convert my work into an hourly wage, it was less than 600 yen. Even then, I thought I had human riches, so it was difficult for me to understand when people around me called me poor (laughs).

Her own debt shows no sign of decreasing. (laughs)” His own debt shows no signs of decreasing, but even so, he feels that poverty is not a word that applies to him. The up-and-coming filmmaker has moved to Tokyo to work on his next film, and is running around the city in search of subjects.