Health minister Akira Nagatsuma recently disclosed that the nation’s relative poverty rate in 2007 was 15.7 percent. What are the implications of roughly one in six citizens living in “poverty”?
Let us introduce a Tokyo man in his 30s, a university graduate, who makes his living as a dispatched day laborer.
He works himself ragged delivering packages or sorting warehouse inventory, and takes home between 6,000 yen and 7,000 yen at the end of each grueling day.
He wants to get married and start a family some day, but knows that is pure fantasy at his income level. “When I don’t even know if I’ll have work tomorrow, how can I make plans for my future?” he laments.
The era in which nearly all Japanese citizens felt financially secure to consider themselves “middle class” is long gone. Today, there are people who cannot even meet their basic needs, no matter how hard they work. This is what the relative poverty rate of 15.7 percent implies.
The relative poverty rate represents the percentage of people whose income is less than half of the nation’s per-capita median income. A 2004 survey by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development put Japan’s relative poverty rate at 14.9 percent, which was the fourth highest among the 30 OECD member nations.
But the administration led by the Liberal Democratic Party had continued to withhold such figures from the public. The LDP refused to face the fact that Japan had become a “poor economic superpower.”
Significance of disclosure
The fact that the new government headed by Prime Minister Yukio Hatoyama’s Democratic Party of Japan has disclosed the nation’s relative poverty rate means the administration is not shying away from the grim reality.
This is significant in itself, but the act also carries even greater significance, in that the Hatoyama administration can now emulate Britain and other nations by setting a specific numerical target to fight poverty–by aiming, for instance, to “halve the relative poverty rate in five years.”
Where do the roots of poverty lie, and what will poverty do to our nation?
During the mid-1990s the progress of economic globalization intensified corporate competition around the world and destabilized employment in advanced nations. In Japan, nonregular workers began replacing full-time workers, and the LDP implemented policies to accelerate this trend. As a result, nonregular workers now account for one-third of the nation’s work force.
Traditionally, Japanese companies supported the lives of their employees and their families with a total package that included health care, pension and insurance against unemployment.
The rapid increase in the number of nonregular workers caused numerous people to lose those benefits. Public assistance was available for people who lost their livelihoods due to illness or old age, but since the system was not meant for younger, able-bodied people who were out of work, those people fell through the cracks in the nation’s safety net.
Asahi Shimbun for more