Japan

Homelessness in Post–World War II Japan

Homelessness proliferated in Japan at the end of World War II, as American conventional and nuclear bombs devastated major urban areas and the country struggled to rebuild its economy. At this time, many families and lone survivors of the war created makeshift housing in parks and other unused public and private spaces. By the time the country entered its period of rapid economic growth (1960–1973), the level of homelessness had waned substantially. However, despite popular myth, homelessness never wholly disappeared—even as Japan enacted its postwar “economic miracle.” Urban poverty and homelessness were largely confined geographically and socially to urban day-labor ghettos called yoseba, where unemployed men, many of them rural migrants, gathered in search of readily accessible employment, cheap housing, and camaraderie.

As the expanding manufacturing, shipping, and construction industries' demand for workers grew, a large pool of cheap and flexible labor was forming in yoseba, composed of men displaced from the declining agricultural and mining sectors, as well as the urban unemployed, persons disaffiliated from their families, the disabled, and former convicts. While many workers were reaping the benefits of Japanese style labor management characterized by lifetime employment and seniority-based advancement, those pushed and pulled into yoseba had to continuously search for short-term work and housing, rendering their livelihoods susceptible to fluctuations in the economy. Levels of homelessness within yoseba increased with rising unemployment during the oildriven recessions of the 1970s, though still not reaching the levels known later. Homelessness was [Page 326]largely short-term and generally confined to these districts. This limited form of homelessness, invisible to many, fueled a popular myth both at home and abroad that Japanese society was immune to the exploding problems of urban poverty and homelessness that the United States was facing.

A homeless person sits with his possessions in a park in Tokyo in June 1995

Hashimoto Noboru/Corbis Sygma; used with permission.

This myth disappeared as the Heisei Recession, beginning in 1991, continued to stall the economy and homelessness proliferated in most major cities and suburban areas. In 2001, the Japanese national government estimated the size of its “literal” homeless population to be around 25,000 people, some staying in the handful of short-term public shelters, but the vast majority living in encampments in major urban parks, stations, riversides, and scattered about the periphery of downtown shopping and business districts. Although activists note that the limitations of counting such a mobile and often hard-to-find population render this number a lower bound estimate of the nations' homeless population, they have yet to be able to provide an alternative estimate. Homelessness is concentrated in major urban areas, with the homeless populations in Osaka and Tokyo making up over one-half of the nation's total. While the growth of homeless persons in these major cities appears to be leveling off, the numbers in nearby suburban areas are on the rise.

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