Poverty threatening Japan’s society as new homeless people spread

Nov. 29, 2009

Poverty threatening Japan’s society as new homeless people spread

The time-honored stone building is part of the head office facilities of the Bank of Japan located a few kilometers north of Ginza, one of the busiest and most fashionable shopping centers in Tokyo. The two-story building faces a canal across a street to the west and above the canal runs an elevated expressway lane. The structure and a small bridge over the canal provide a good shelter-like environment for homeless people to live. Actually, “houses” of corrugated cardboard and wooden boards occupy some places around the bridge.
This is just one of the scenes one can see at corners of parks, station squares and other public places in Tokyo. As far as ordinary Japanese people are concerned, how the homeless live had been an unrelated problem until late last year, when a new breed of homeless people began to emerge amid Japan’s economic crisis.
Many Japanese companies resorted to firing contract or temporary workers in an effort to survive the global recession from late 2008 to this year. These workers’ contracts had been extended many times, giving them almost the same job conditions as those for regular workers, among them company housing. Some of them had no money to find their own housing and became homeless on the very day when their contracts were terminated. Eventually, they had to join the existing homeless people on the street.
Poverty is filtering into Japan’s society calmly and steadily. The Japanese government recently announced that Japan’s relative poverty rate had climbed to 15.7 pct in 2007. The rate represents the percentage of people whose annual income is less than half of the median of disposable income for each of the people, estimated at 2.28 million yen for the year under review. The finding means that one of every six persons suffers poverty in a country which had once boasted a stable society supported by many middle-income earners. The percentage was a staggering 54.3 pct for single-parent families.

A windy and rainy night, a rainy and snowy night. There is no means for me to tolerate cold during such a night. So, I nibble at hard salt and sip sake lees soup.

While coughing, sniveling and stroking my small beard, I tell myself cocksure there must be no one who is more talented than I. But because it is so cold, I pull hemp bedclothes over my head and wear all the short-sleeved clothes I have. Still I cannot warm myself. In a cold night like this, the parents of a person who is even poorer than I would be shivering from cold in hanger while his wife and children would be crying with weak voices. How do you make your living in such a situation?
People say the world is vast, but it appears to be small to me. People say the sun and the moon brightly shine on us and bless us, but they do not shine for me. Is this the case for other people, too? Or is this only for me?

I was born as a human being and I work just as other persons do. But I have nothing to wear other than sleeveless hemp clothes and seaweed-like ragged clothes. I have to live in a leaning, nearly collapsed house while having my father and mother sleep above my head and my wife and kids beyond my legs with straws placed as a mat on the ground. There is no fire at the kitchen and our rice cooker is left unused and covered with a spider’s web. They are begging for something to eat with feeble voices, but a whip-wielding village official’s voice is heard into our bedroom, just like the saying that a short thing should be cut even shorter. I wonder if leading a life in this world is really helpless like this.
(A personal translation)

This is a poem composed by Yamanoue Okura, a court official who was active early in the eighth century, when he was in his 60s. The long poem, which is included in Japan’s oldest waka poem anthology Manyoshu, takes the form of a dialogue between two poor men. Unlike other waka poets of his age, who made poems about their beloved and kin or about noble persons, Okura left poems about the life of ordinary people.
The spread of people who have newly become homeless in Japan is attributed mainly to the global economic crisis that began in the autumn of last year. But some domestic structural reasons may also be cited for the phenomenon, such as competition-oriented business practices and a lack of social systems, something like a safety net, to rescue jobless people and get them back to the workplace.
The streets at Ginza are filled with many shoppers toward the year-end shopping season, but their purse strings appear to be tighter. People at the Bank of Japan buildings are racking their brains for a prescription to stimulate consumers’ demand and pull the economy out of the current deflationary spiral. But it is unknown if and how soon they will be able to find an answer to the question.