| Home > North-East Asia >> Japan | |
'Hidden poverty' eating away at Japan
Agence France Presse - August 4, 2010
Patrice Novotny, Tokyo – Consumer gluttony, astronomic real-estate prices and jobs for life were once normal in Japan – but today the country also has millions of poor people desperately struggling to make ends meet.
Two decades after Japan's wealth bubble popped, its citizens have got used to higher unemployment and homeless people sleeping in the streets. Statistics released for the first time last year held yet another surprise.
Nearly one in six Japanese lives below the poverty line – meaning they earn less than half the median household income, or less than $1,830 a month for a four-person family – in a country that prides itself on egalitarianism.
Many of the worst-off are single mothers, the elderly and people who lost their jobs in the worst recession since World War II.
Swelling their ranks has been a new generation of workers who lack the job security their parents enjoyed during Japan's "miracle" growth years from the 1960s onward and through the go-go wealth era of the 1980s and early '90s.
Temporary and part-time jobs and short-term contracts have become the norm for half of all workers under 39, a group dubbed "freeters" – made up of the words "freelancer" and "arbeiter," German for worker.
"There is a generation gap between those who were hired up until the '90s on permanent contracts and those who entered the job market later," said David-Antoine Malinas, a social scientist at the Maison Franco-Japonaise Tokyo.
They are often paid less and are more vulnerable to job market swings during downturns than permanent staff. Hundreds of thousands of temporary workers were laid off during the global recession of 2008-09.
"I worked for 20 years as a temporary employee at a branch office of a large company before losing my job in March 2009," said one middle-aged man, a member of the new poor at an antipoverty meeting in Tokyo.
"I lived in the company's dormitory and was kicked out one month after I was laid off," he said, adding that had been forced to occasionally sleep rough in public places, making it much harder to find a new job.
Many on the brink of poverty fall over the edge because of the demise of family structures that once acted as a safety net, said Aya Abe, a researcher at the National Institute on Population and Social Security.
In the past, three generations often lived under one roof, meaning that up to four people – the parents and grandparents – could work and pool their wages, which limited the shock of one person losing their job.
Today "many single mothers juggle two jobs," Abe said. "They work in the daytime, then cook dinner for their children before heading off to their second job. They return home around 3:00 a.m. to sleep before a new day begins."
It is often the rising tide of elderly who pay the heaviest price. The role of the company and family have diminished in people's lives, but the government has failed to fill the void, experts say.
"For the past 20 years, taxes and social security contributions have risen," to the detriment of the poor, who have seen little in return, Abe said.
Social mores dictate that almost no one begs in Japan, and crime rates are low, but Abe said there was widespread "hidden poverty," where people may, for example, skip a meal just to save money.
The Japanese public only became aware of the country's rising poverty in the mid-2000s, a trend many commentators blamed on pro-market reforms under conservative former Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi.
"The public became aware after public broadcaster NHK first introduced the term 'working poor' in their report, which was followed by the Lehman shock," said Makoto Yuasa, head of the nonprofit Link Association.
Yuasa was the organizer of a tent village of irregular workers who had lost their jobs that arose in the winter of 2008-09 in a park on the edge of Tokyo's government district. The event stunned many and helped change official attitudes about the right of everyone – not just the elderly and disabled, but also young people – to welfare benefits. When the center-left Democratic Party of Japan took power last year, it recruited Yuasa as an adviser, leading to the establishment of "one stop service" facilities for the unemployed during his six-month stint.
Japan's growing poverty has brought much soul-searching.
"Poverty's dark shadow can be seen in various social problems – rising suicide, solitary death and child abuse, and languishing birth rates," the Asashi Shimbun daily said in a recent editorial. "This is a malaise that can threaten the very existence of our country."
New Prime Minister Naoto Kan has vowed to act to "reduce the factors that make people unhappy." "The feeling of suffocation has increased" since the early '90s, he said, highlighting a very high suicide rate.
The government has introduced bills to establish a minimum pension for elderly people without financial resources and strengthen safeguards for temporary workers.
However, since Kan's party took heavy losses in July 11 Upper House elections, these bills are on hold and may never become law.
See also:
 |