Andrea's Rambling Notes - once from Japan, now from Canada

::Andrea's Rambling Notes - once from Japan, now from Canada::

My notes and my memories: sometimes about a mom - sometimes about a wife - sometimes about a woman - sometimes about our life

::Author::

Name::Andrea
From::Small city/town, B.C., Canada
I am a short girl from the west cost of BC, Canada and I am a proud Canadian. I went to Japan in 2000 because my Dad told me I would regret it for the rest of my life if I didn't. He was right. I lived a good life found my husband from the other side of the world and have a beautiful daughter. Basically we lead a pretty normal life filled with normal ups and downs. We both come from different cultures: me Canadian, him Chinese. Living in Japan was a real eye opener about who I am and about the people I associate myself with. I lived and loved in Japan but the time to move on came upon us and in May of 2006 we left and moved to Canada: a huge move for us all. We are now trying to start up again, remodel our lives and create our future for our family. I now feel like a tourist in the country of my birth, my eyes see different and my life will be forever changed. This blog is my notes and observations of our life, our changes, our adventures and new beginnings. Welcome.
View my complete

::Recent Entries::

::Personal Links::

My Japanese Culture Teaching Notes

::My Family's Sites::

Alisha - a site set up by friends and family of my little sis

Phrax - my step-brother

Blue Mountain Stable

::Index::

An Index of past posts - the Japan Years

::Archives::

::Image Event Album::

My Image Event Photo Album

::My FlickR Photos::

www.flickr.com

::Tech Sites::

Tech2all

Blog Flak

::Extra Internet Info::

Canadian Atlas

National Geographic

Wikipedia

World TimesZones - please check this BEFORE calling me!

Currency Converter

eigoNavi - a pretty good language converter

The Samurai Appliance Repair Man - a funny repair site for N

::World News::

Generation Woman

Japan Times

Counter Punch

Japanese General Union - a must! read before working in Japan

::RSS Feed::

Blogarama

Buttons created with the Chicklet Creator

Sunday, September 11, 2005

Poverty in Japan

This will be a long blog; sorry, but once I got started I just couldn’t stop.
I typed the words ‘poverty in Japan’ and got back a ton of information. A surprisingly large amount actually had to do with Japan’s contributions towards the UN aid packet for poor people and Japan’s stance on dept cancellation.
Generally Japan donates a large amount of money to needy countries, but they do it in the form of loans that they consider needs to be paid back.

Debt cancellation resisted
Japan is the only member of DAC that provides majority of its aid in the form of loans. Despite the global call for debt cancellation, Japan’s only response to the Köln Initiative, agreed at the G7/8 summit in 1999, was to extend substantial debt relief through rescheduling and grants-in-aid to cover repayments. This policy was maintained in the Medium-Term Policy. The
government has consistently stated that it would not declare cancellation of debt, arguing that it would create a “moral hazard” on the side of the borrowers. Little progress was made regarding the debt issue at the G7/8 Summit held in Japan in July 2000.
(I don’t know what came out of the 2005 one a short time ago.)

Very few people are aware of this: even here in Japan. This lack of understanding is one of the problems with the ongoing tension between Japan and China. Many Japanese people believe that they have already paid back their atrocities on China due to large aid packages given to China to help them build their country back up. What they don’t realize is that this money was actually all a loan and China is still paying it back to Japan.

Most of my students tell me that Japan doesn’t have poor people; that everyone is actually middle class.
I always point it out to them that that is not really possible.
They grudgingly admit this.
I get the general impression that they want to believe that they all are. It lets them turn a blind eye to the homeless people that I see almost every day.
If you go to Shizuoka city you will see a few homeless people sleeping in the subway section of the station. They used to camp out all day but the authorities have started preventing them from doing this. I occasionally see the odd ‘bicycle person’ camped out under the over pass near my place when the weather is bad, and there is always a guy eating cup a noodle things under the over pass stairs. There is this one guy who has made himself quite a huge home of blue tarp under the bridge just outside Shizuoka. When the river almost crested a few years ago we were wondering about him. He is still there.
A couple of months ago this tiny, little old lady walked into the supermarket at the same time as me. She stunk like she had not had a shower in months. She bought herself some noodle soup and some thing else then quietly walked out. She sat out side on the bench watching everyone leave the store and I noticed that not a single person looked at her, or even acknowledged that she was sitting there. She was surrounded by garbage bags full of her worldly possessions and wearing clothing, that was ten times too hot for the weather but probably making her feel protected from the world.
I felt guilty, as I always do when I see homeless people, but I knew that if I had offered her any of my groceries I would have been refused. She probably would have acted as if I had insulted her.
Walk down East Hastings Street in Vancouver and you will be asked at least four times for some pocket change. You might get the offering of a song or a poem for some money. In Japan this never happens.
I have only once seen someone beg for money and it was so shocking and scary I didn’t know how to react. It doesn’t happen here; it is a pride thing.
When I see homeless people in Japan I get angry; where is their family? Homeless people in Japan, to me, are a symbol of the breakdown of family values in Japan. Families traditionally were large and close knit: very extended. Homes consisted of the grandparents and at least one child with their spouse and children, sometimes three families in total. There was always a baby sitter, a role model, a cook, a nurse and a moneymaker. They relied on each other to survive. With economic development, the exploding economy and the crazy system of transfers, families have fallen apart. These days it is common for the mother to live in one city with the kids, the father in another city because of transfers, and the grandparents to live at the opposite end of the country.
A few months ago, when that Japanese man was killed in Iraq in an ambush because he was a personal guard, this spreading family problem came to light. His own parents didn’t even know that he was in Iraq. They didn’t even know he was a French Foreign Legion soldier. I shook my head in amazement.

In Japan it is called ‘invisible poverty’, although I see it so clearly every day. I see it in the people trudging to work, in the terribly worn down apartments near my place that people actually live in. I see it in their eyes on the train and in the tatterness of their shoes.
This article contains some amazing information and background into the growing and slowly becoming visible plight of the homeless people of this country.

THE HOMELESS BACKGROUND
In the wake of this economic trend, the number of homeless people has rapidly increased. According to a government document in early 1999, its number is 8,660 in Osaka, 4,300 in Tokyo, 758 in Nagoya, making the total 16 thousand homeless population in 14 major Japanese cities; the figures apparently underestimated or already outdated, coming to almost half of the current assessment made by NGO activists. (For example, even Yokohama City's official statistics says the number of its homeless residents as of August 1999 has grown 1.8 times over last 12 months). They live in tents, shacks, cardboard houses, or sleep just on benches, in public parks, on riverbanks or along roads. It is already a part of landscape of almost every major city in Japan. A majority of them are single, male, daily-wage labourers who once contributed to the economic expansion as construction workers, though more recent homeless people include dismissed younger workers, and according to a female journalist, 10% of the homeless in Tokyo are women.

On paper the numbers don’t seem like much when you consider the population of this country, but it is terrifying when you consider that the population is shrinking.
The fact that 10% of the homeless are women only scratches the surface of the plight of woman here. The number of women that are classified as poor is considerably higher. They may not be homeless but they and their children are sometimes near starvation.

A new Japanese government survey estimates that the number of fatherless families has skyrocketed, hitting 1.22 million in fiscal 2003 in the nation of 128 million. This is the highest number ever recorded and represents a massive 28.3% increase from the previous survey conducted five years ago. The figures also show that the vast majority of children in these households live far below the poverty line, creating a rapidly growing underclass of impoverished families ………
…..Most lone mothers and their children now live in poverty, with many experiencing real hardship. In 2001, the average annual income of a lone-mother family was about 2.52 million yen (US$23,850). The latest data estimate this has fallen to just 2.12 million yen in fiscal 2002, almost three times less than the median figure. In 2000, the average household income was about 6.17 million yen, and for an elderly household the figure was 3.19 million yen. Some low-income families are experiencing such extreme poverty that there have been a few cases of mothers and their children dying from malnutrition. One such case was reported at the beginning of February when a 27-year-old mother and her three-year-old son were found starved to death in their apartment in Saitama Prefecture near Tokyo. Police reported that there was no food in the apartment and the woman only had eight yen ($0.07) in her purse…. .

This article above gives a brief glance at this escalating problem. It is interesting to note that PM Koizumi is divorced and I once read that he has had no contact with his children since his divorce. According to many that I have talk to, this is unfortunately very common.
The plight of the poor single woman of Japan is researched in depth in this article. Unfortunately, it is a book that you have to buy.

Abstract: This article addresses escalating poverty in Japan among single-mother families within an ideological arena where social problems are obfuscated by a growing acceptance of American-based individualism, rather than rightfully grounding such problems in societal structures. The work postulates a theoretical framework based on intergenerational poverty formed within the nexus of capitalism, which in turn is linked to present and historical familialism. An in-depth study of twenty-eight families is presented, as well as a critical analysis of contemporary issues in social welfare policies and debates in Japan’s conservative political and cultural milieu. The theoretical orientation advocated in this article is crucial in rendering invisible poverty “visible,” representing a first step in developing a societal awareness of and stronger advocacy for impoverished people in present-day Japan.

I also found this article in the Japan Times. It ties in with woman in Japan having to live lower income lives.

You say that lesbians are forced to live under special conditions.
Among developed countries, Japan has a very small number of women in positions of power. This fact is reflected in the situation of lesbians.
When a woman acknowledges that she is a lesbian, she loses the option of getting married to a man who will support her. It is difficult for a woman to live by herself in Japan. There are few jobs where she can earn a decent salary. The average woman's salary is about 60 percent that of a man's, so being a woman in this country automatically means being poorer, which means lesbians are poorer, too. That's why some get married anyway.

A very moving photo journal of the largest slum in Japan, can be seen here; Kamagasaki. The photos are striking and very well done.

The BBC did a Crossing Continents audio on this slum in 1998. If you click the audio link on the side you can actually listen to this program.

This leads to my class the other day where we were talking about donating in Japan, or the lack of. It was all tied into Typhoon 14 and the Hurricane.
Not to say that Japanese people are not generous, because they are! All you have to do is look at our numerous typhoons and earthquakes to know that the people of this country are very good at helping out in a time of need, but it is the regular every day donations that I don’t see here. It is possible that it is more prevalent in Tokyo type cities, but out in my neck of the woods it is almost non-existent.

I am talking about ‘Salvation Army’ type of donations. In Canada every town has a Sali Ann box for dumping your unwanted but still good clothes into. You can bring old cutlery and furniture that would be impossible to sell but would be embraced by people who have nothing.
I am talking about the Food Bank bins you see as you leave the supermarket. I once read an article where this woman, to help her children deal with a news cast the kids accidentally saw about poor people, she started a shopping tradition. Every time they go shopping the kids have to each pick out something for the Food Bank bins. In this way the children understood the power of donation and did not seem so helpless when the subject of poor people came up.
I am talking about those little loose change boxes you see at every store for the Red Cross, Unicef, and countless other organizations.

In Japan, people bundle up their clothes and throw them in the garbage. If you throw away a futon it has to be cut up first. I couldn’t sleep for two nights after I did this one time. I felt so guilty and useless. I now plague Angela with a million phone calls for her to ask her church if they will take them. There is one school here that collects old clothes, but only one day a year. Considering the uselessly small closets that most homes have here, that one-day is NEVER at a convenient time.
I have never once seen a Food Bank type of bin at any supermarket, or any where for that matter.
And loose change boxes are almost non-existent. There are a few for AIDS that I have seen at bars but even in the major international airports you will be hard pressed to find a loose change bin to dump all of your extra change that is totally useless in another country.

It is this type of donation that, I feel, would make the general public aware of the fact that not everyone in their community is middle-class. I once asked one of my managers about this, and if it would be possible to start something. He said there was ‘no policy for it’. What ever that means.

Then my student said that he believes that Japanese people would not take food or clothing from a stranger, or a non family person. He says it would be embarrassing to both parties.

I said nothing: just pursed my lips in thought.
Pride???

We all know that our contries are far from perfect and that poverty is unfortunatly a daily occurance. But I read on this one News site that Canada was ranked third on the standard of living scale; USA was sixth and Japan was ninth. Norway was number one.

Return Home

Posted by (Top)Andrea::9/11/2005 :: 3 Comments:

Post/Read Comments

---------------------------------------