Reducing homelessness in Japan, a history of systemic and cultural oversight
Fun fact: when cities grow, we see homelessness. When cities grow faster than they can handle, homelessness becomes even easier to spot. The favelas (slums) in Brazil, Rio de Janeiro are debatably a sign of economic success. A few decades ago they represented the faith of thousands of Brazil’s low-socioeconomic individuals who’d left their homes with the ambition of ‘making it big’ in a growing city. Nowadays they’re considered an overlooked middle-class (Data Favela Institute, 2016). The overcrowding and the human slavery are consequences of a city unable to catch up to their own success. However, slums obviously don’t make top global liveability rankings. On the other side of the world, Japan has managed their homeless crisis significantly well – they have the lowest rate of homelessness in the world on paper (Greaterchange, 2022) – but many readering this article would recall the homelessness during the Tokyo 2020 Olympics and approach this rating with scepticism. Digging deeper we find a favourable definition of ‘homelessness’ alongside one of the best social security nets in the world. This article is the story of how Japan’s homeless rate is down 84% of what it was 20 years ago when the rest of the world ran the opposite way, growing 50% on average (Homeless World Cup, 2022).
Homelessness in Japan wasn’t really considered homelessness until the 2000’s. In the 1960’s, homelessness was synonymous to day labourers who were confined to yoseba’s (shelters, slums, flophouses) (Kamagasaki Forum, 2004). From the 1960’s and 1970’s, day labourers were often found in construction– work which made them particularly vulnerable to the volatile business cycle. While contracts would last days and employers would payfor their accommodation, when the workers’ contracts expired,they would find themselves with nowhere to go besides the yoseba’s. By the Hotel Business Law (ryokangyou-hou), flophouses of the yoseba were almost like hotels, with rent paid by the day, and basic facilities like showers and toilets provided. This idea of ‘sleeping it rough’ became so heavily associated with day labourers who resided in the yoseba that the majority of Japan did not consider it a social issue that required intervention. It simply came with the job if you were a day labourer. This perception changed when the 1990’s economic depression hit and homelessness became an unignorable epidemic.
Newly renovated flophouse district Sanya - one of three doya-gai districts, where men have long lived in flophouse-style rooms (doya) and found work at nearby labour markets (yoseba).
The first national government of Japanese homelessness conducted in 2003 listed 25,296 homeless individuals in Japan, with 23.4% of these people in Tokyo. A majority of these individuals were middle-aged elderly men, with an average age of 56. They were the people in the 1980’s and 1990’s who left their hometowns for the big city, back when Japan was the second largest economy in the world (after the US). Over the next two decades, a slowing economy characterised by the GFC, Abenomics, and natural disasters seemed to have done the opposite of what growing economies do; homelessness started going down. Fast forward to 2023, and the country’s homelessness population recorded 3,065 and only 661 (21.6%) in Tokyo (Margolis, n.d). Of course, this doesn’t make sense. With 14 million people in Tokyo, there’s only 661 (0.005%, down 84% from 2003) people with insecure housing? So how did Japan drastically reduce this figure?
Japan’s definition of homelessness is narrow. It’s only people on the streets. This definition falls under one category – “Roofless” – despite there being four under ETHOS’s (European Typology of Homelessness and housing inclusion) definition: Roofless, Houseless, Insecure and Inadequate. Reality is skewed, but how skewed?
The Japanese count homelessness by the number of people seen at parks and riversides in the daytime. Why? Because the 2002 “Act on Special Measures concerning Assistant in Self-Support of Homeless” defines the homeless as those who reside in “urban parks, riverbanks, roads and railway stations for no valid reason and conduct their daily lives there”. In fact, counts are not conducted during the night. In January 2016, the Advocacy and Research Centre for Homelessness found numbers were 2.5x underreported during the day, with more than double sleeping it rough at night. Moreover, a survey by the Ministry of Health, Labour and Welfare found that in 50,000 people over the age of 18, 6% experience “houselessness” or “insecurity” as defined by ETHOS.
What’s changed, or barely changed from the 1960’s to 2020’s is instead of people living in yosebas, they now seek refuge in 24-hour internet cafes. A whole class of homeless individuals known as cyber-homeless reside within these $15/night internet cafes. The Ministry of Health, Labour and Welfare reported 4,977 people living in internet cafes in 2019 and the Tokyo Metropolitan Government (TMG) claim over 80% have jobs.
Regardless, Japan probably tops the world for reducing their number of street-level homelessness over the past two decades. In contrast to Japan’s 3,065 people (0.024% of Japan’s population) on the streets, the US recorded 582,462 (0.18%) in 2022 (NAED, 2023). The success of Japan has been credited to its welfare and public assistance system. Not only are there higher rates of institutionalism for mental illness in Japan, but when help is asked, it comes quickly. Public assistance cases are ruled upon within the month it’s filed, while systems like America take up to two months. Moreover, no-one is rejected.
Japan’s social security system is broken down into 3 security nets (Kiener, 2019):
1) A net protecting all regularly employed individuals.
2) Job Seeker support for those ready to enter the workforce and those not ready.
3) Public Assistance Act (seikatsu hogo-hou).
The Japanese Social Security System.
Source: dlisv03.media.osaka-cu.ac.jp/contents/osakacu/kiyo/111TDB2888.pdf
The seikatsu hogo-hou includes eight forms of public assistance that can be applied for and paid out through the same welfare system. It covers almost 75% of the relative poverty line in cash benefits just for living assistance. And if you’re living on the streets, you get access to housing assistance on top. This benefit surmounts to 126% of the relative poverty line (Goto et al., 2020). Within OECD, this gap between an individual on minimum wage and public assistance has never been smaller.
So, if Japan provides sufficient welfare support to those in homelessness, then why does the problem of homelessness in Japan persist?
A poor definition of homelessness by the Japanese government paired with a culture of help-avoidance plague cities like Tokyo are likely the reasons. A culture of not asking for help extends into Japanese society within cyber-homeless individuals and coined terms like hikikomori’s (individuals of severe social withdrawal). Public assistance is great if people ask for it. Some don’t even recognise they need it. Disability awareness is not well recognised within Japanese classrooms, with life-long consequences. Japan’s failure in their special education system can be attributed to teachers failing to ask for help when there are students with special needs. Many students go through school undiagnosed, then into employment, and eventually onto the streets, completely unaware.
Image of Cyber-Homeless (サイバーホームレス) aka Net Café Refugee.
When the Tokyo Olympics ‘forcibly removed’ individuals off the street, we often forget the story that many chose not to applied for public assistance, and the one man who did was approved within weeks and moved into social housing (Endo, 2021). We forget when spectators were banned, the TMG arranged stays for hundreds of homeless to reside in the now empty hotels (LA Times, 2021). Although demolitions happened, and passive aggressive signs were put up since the 2013 announcements, it’s been nothing compared to other Olympic cities in history. The 2024 Paris Olympics saw the construction of 10 temporary regional centres to relocate the homeless off the streets (Federico, 2023). Even worse, initially, food distribution projects to the homeless were banned in certain neighbourhoods.
City changes as Olympics near.
Source: https://www.homelessworldcup.org/stories/beyond-the-stadium-japan
The 2020 Tokyo Olympic drama was driven into the spotlight by news anchors during the peak of COVID-19. There were no other major sports news to report, and so it was carpe diem. Japan in fact, has been a leader in public assistance, and the root issue emerges as the culturally ingrained avoidance of seeking help, which is shamed upon now and has been shamed on for many generations of the past. As people move into internet cafes, homelessness in Japan today is likely as big a cultural issue as the Government’s failure to recognise them.
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