We remem­ber back in the 1980’s when many Amer­i­cans feared that Japan was going to buy up all of America’s prop­erty. Nowa­days instead, many Amer­i­cans fear that China will ask for imme­di­ate pay­ment on all of our government’s debt.

We bring this up because since the 1980’s Japan afflu­ence has shrunk a lit­tle bit. Japan is now real­iz­ing that some in their pop­u­la­tion are in rel­a­tive poverty. For many years the afflu­ence of the Japan­ese kept this prob­lem hid­den. Now with stats say­ing to con­trary and a rash of sui­cides amongst bread­win­ners, Japan is begin­ning to see the need for a social safety net.

From the IPS, writer Mut­suko Murakami details Japan’s new realization.

Japan’s rude awak­en­ing to the real­ity of poverty amid seem­ing afflu­ence in some sec­tors of its soci­ety came about when, for the first time in 45 years, the gov­ern­ment released in Octo­ber 2009 data show­ing the extent of poverty grip­ping the coun­try. Health, labour and wel­fare min­is­ter Akira Nagat­suma announced then that 15.7 per­cent of the Japan­ese peo­ple and 14.2 per­cent of Japan­ese chil­dren and teenagers under 17 were in rel­a­tive poverty, cit­ing a 2007 survey.

The first dis­turb­ing warn­ing sign of Japan­ese chil­dren liv­ing in poverty came in 2006 fol­low­ing the release of the report, ‘Eco­nomic Sur­vey of Japan 2006’, by the Orga­ni­za­tion for Eco­nomic Coop­er­a­tion and Devel­op­ment (OECD), which under­takes such stud­ies every five years.

Of the 30 OECD mem­ber coun­tries, it said Japan ranked sec­ond to the United States in terms of chil­dren liv­ing in rel­a­tive poverty, with 13.7 per­cent, up two per­cent from the l990s. Until then the Japan­ese pub­lic had long dis­tanced itself from the notion of poverty, espe­cially where it involved children.

The Japan­ese, along with the gov­ern­ment, used to view poverty in absolute terms, that is, as a crit­i­cal state of hunger or sur­vival. It was only in 2006 when the East Asian coun­try began to recog­nise the idea of “rel­a­tive poverty.”

“For a long time the Japan­ese had main­tained a firm belief that every­one was more or less in mid­dle class, with no one hav­ing any­thing to do with poverty,” says Dr Abe. Chil­dren in poverty were often viewed as iso­lated cases, notes the author of a widely acclaimed book, ‘Poverty of Children’.

The seem­ing afflu­ence of Japan­ese soci­ety belies images of chil­dren starv­ing on the streets or chil­dren unable to go to school. After all, the law pro­vides for com­pul­sory edu­ca­tion for chil­dren aged six to 15, and more than 90 per­cent of junior high school grad­u­ates belong­ing to the mid­dle class are able to move on to senior high school. The nation’s med­ical insur­ance sys­tem cov­ers every­one – in the­ory, at least – and mil­lions of Japan­ese tourists are known to go each year on shop­ping sprees abroad with chil­dren in tow.

Yet, there are sub­tle yet very real indi­ca­tions of poverty, which afflicts chil­dren in par­tic­u­lar. These are based on find­ings that have pointed to increas­ing poverty and widen­ing eco­nomic dis­par­ity in Japan, based on the lat­est avail­able data gen­er­ated in 2008. Thou­sands of con­tract work­ers and part-time work­ers lost jobs, as the man­u­fac­tur­ing indus­try cut pro­duc­tion and the ser­vice indus­try shrank.

The local media, for instance, reported that 33,000 chil­dren across the nation did not have health insur­ance. There have also been reports that many par­ents could not pay for school lunches, bring­ing the total unpaid bills nation­wide to two bil­lion yen (23 mil­lion U.S. dollars).

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