Invisible Poverty in Japan: Case Studies and Realities of Single Mothers

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Invisible Poverty in Japan: Case Studies and Realities ofSingle MothersOsamu Aoki PhD a & Deborah McDowell Aoki PhD ba Graduate School of Education at Hokkaido University , Sapporo, Japan E-mail:b Hokusei Gakuen University (Junior College Department) , Sapporo, Japan E-mail:Published online: 12 Oct 2008.

To cite this article: Osamu Aoki PhD & Deborah McDowell Aoki PhD (2005) Invisible Poverty in Japan: Case Studies andRealities of Single Mothers, Journal of Poverty, 9:1, 1-21, DOI: 10.1300/J134v09n01_01

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Invisible Poverty in Japan:Case Studies and Realities

of Single Mothers

Osamu AokiDeborah McDowell Aoki

ABSTRACT. This article addresses escalating poverty in Japan amongsingle-mother families within an ideological arena where social prob-lems are obfuscated by a growing acceptance of American-based indi-vidualism, rather than rightfully grounding such problems in societalstructures. The work postulates a theoretical framework based onintergenerational poverty formed within the nexus of capitalism, whichin turn is linked to present and historical familialism. An in-depth studyof twenty-eight families is presented, as well as a critical analysis of con-temporary issues in social welfare policies and debates in Japan’s con-servative political and cultural milieu. The theoretical orientationadvocated in this article is crucial in rendering invisible poverty “visi-ble,” representing a first step in developing a societal awareness of andstronger advocacy for impoverished people in present-day Japan. [Arti-cle copies available for a fee from The Haworth Document Delivery Service:1-800-HAWORTH. E-mail address: <[email protected]> Website:<http://www.HaworthPress.com> © 2005 by The Haworth Press, Inc. All rights re-served.]

Osamu Aoki, PhD, is Professor in the Graduate School of Education at Hokkaido Uni-versity in Sapporo, Japan (E-mail: [email protected]).

Deborah McDowell Aoki, PhD, is Professor at Hokusei Gakuen University (JuniorCollege Department) in Sapporo, Japan (E-mail: [email protected]).

Journal of Poverty, Vol. 9(1) 2005http://www.haworthpress.com/web/JPOV

2005 by The Haworth Press, Inc. All rights reserved.Digital Object Identifier: 10.1300/J134v09n01_01 1

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KEYWORDS. Poverty, Japan, familialism, social welfare, single-mother family

INTRODUCTION

It is well known that Japan has been struggling with an unrelenting reces-sion for over a decade and has yet to develop any inspired strategy, whichwould facilitate a way out of the economic doldrums. To the contrary, it is of-ten argued that Japan will continue its downward financial spiral until theeconomy finally hits bottom sometime in the near future. Ever expanding un-employment, reduction in wages and pensions, and burgeoning costs in medi-cal and educational expenditures are creating waves of uncertainty amongJapanese people.1 In the media and press, the issue of poverty has always beenviewed as a problem of other countries existing in distant places like theUnited States or in poor developing countries, but, recently, poverty and itsmultifarious ramifications have come home to Japan. However, as a country,poverty is still not viewed nor acknowledged as a serious matter rooted in thefabric of Japanese society.

There are several main points which will be addressed within this article:(1) While occasionally there are sympathetic portrayals of homeless people, itis difficult to observe the poverty of single-mother families and older people,who receive welfare allowances, because they are hidden within the main-stream population and their very existence is seldom publicly acknowledged.Nevertheless, the total number of older people and single-mother families wholive in poverty exists on a much greater scale than the problem of homelesspeople; (2) Myth-making regarding the ideology that if one simply exertsenough effort they will be successful has a deep resonance among the Japa-nese. This reification of the ideology of individualism and adaptation of the“American Dream” transforms what is actually a social problem grounded insocietal structures into a problem based on the individual; (3) There continuesto be considerable stagnation in the development of research into issues ofpoverty, which further contributes to the ongoing masking of such concerns.

When we analyze various communities in-depth, it can readily be seen thatpoverty has an intergenerational and structural base. We can look at publichousing2 for low-income individuals as a kind of poor community consistingof welfare families, older people living on small government pensions and theworking poor; all of these groups share similar backgrounds of impoverish-ment. Furthermore, upon examination of children’s development and analysisof low-income communities on a wide scale, it is clear that parents and chil-dren are intergenerationally locked in a disadvantageous position. Addition-

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ally, as we survey families of older people, even though they have nationalhealth insurance and a pension, there is a sizable gap based on cumulative ad-vantages and disadvantages (Hiraoka, 2001) existing between various personswho receive medical and/or social support services.

In this article, the intergenerational and structural nature of poverty may bedefined as a “chain of disadvantages,” which links various forms of depriva-tion such as homelessness, low pensions for older people and the working poorincluding single-mother families. All of these superficially distinct manifesta-tions of poverty are actually connected through the foundation of the family,as the current economic and ideological basis of Japanese society. The eluci-dation of this chain, as well as its various manifestations and linkages withinsociety, is the focus of this article.

THEORETICAL OVERVIEW

In this article, we will argue that it is necessary to construct a frameworkbased on intergenerational poverty formed within the nexus of capitalism,which in turn is linked to familialism. We are focusing on the “cycle of pov-erty,” as posited by scholars in Western countries, particularly Great Britainand the United States (Rutter and Madge, 1976; Berthoud, 1976). In theUnited States, this topic has been debated since the rediscovery of poverty inthe 1960s, and the subsequent formulation of various governmental policiesregarding poverty commonly referred to as the “War on Poverty” (Galbraith,1958; Lewis, 1959; Harrington, 1962; Moynihan, 1968). After this initial re-surgence, the issue of poverty seemed to recede into abeyance for a while,reemerging in the 1980s and early 1990s redefined in terms of the“underclass” (Gans, 1995; Wilson, 1987; Auletta, 1983), or “welfare depend-ency” (Murray, 1984; Mead, 1992; Bone and Elwood, 1994). Also, in the late1980s into the 1990s, longitudinal studies produced new facts regarding issuesof intergenerational poverty. These findings highlighted the influence of pov-erty on children and generations of poor families mired in low-income neigh-borhoods with little hope of escape (Gottschalf, Maclanahan and Sandfur,1994; Duncan and Brooks-Gunn, 1997; Duncan, Yeung, Brooks-Gunn andSmith, 1998).

Some of these studies disingenuously used and manipulated emotionallycharged rhetoric, such as “welfare dependency” and “underclass,” to facilitatethe passage of the 1996 Welfare Reform Bill producing not only the continu-ing crisis of poverty and inequality (Mink, 1998; Abramovitz, 2000; Kilty andSegal, 2001; Piven, 2001), but also an accelerating bi-polariziation of rich andpoor (Keister, 2000; Ehrenreich, 2001; Phillips, 2002). Generally, poverty

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studies advocating a greater role for the government in providing assistance toimpoverished individuals proved to be politically ineffective against the sub-sequent war against the poor. More clearly, scholars during this period couldnot successfully explain the problem of poverty to the American people in anunderstandable way leading many individuals to disengage from the issue en-tirely, and an ideological conservative agenda held sway within the turbulentpolitical arena.

In Japan, while there are many similarities with the United States, there aredisjunctures as well. Although America hotly debated the problem of povertyfrom the 1960s continuing through the 1990s, due to the general economicboom in Japan through the 1960s to the 1980s, it wasn’t necessary to ponderthe issue of impoverishment that was being created at that time. In otherwords, relative poverty or instability in the lives of working class individualswas actually becoming a serious problem, but it was thoroughly masked by thegrowing economic bubble, which created the so-called middle-class syn-drome (pervasive consciousness of and identification with membership in themiddle class), developing in Japan during the 1970s. For example, structuralproblems continued through the bubble period relating to ongoing mine clo-sures throughout Japan, strong competition from agricultural imports and newinternational restrictions on fishing grounds. While individuals in these indus-tries were experiencing slippage in terms of wages and job security, they wereable to procure other low-wage jobs; thus there was little discussion of issuesregarding poverty during the heady days of the bubble. However, after theeconomic bubble “burst” in the 1990s, the accumulation of these structuralproblems, along with the restructuring of most industries in Japan, have led tothe increasing problem of poverty, and the bipolarization of rich and poor isnow clearly manifested (Tachibanaki, 1998; Sato, 2000).

In general, inequality in the transmission of wealth, as well as poverty, hasbeen discussed mostly in advanced and industrialized countries, but in tradi-tional and developing countries such inequalities, particularly in families, areaccepted as “natural” due to their connection to older, sometimes feudal-basedsystems (Nussbaum, 2000). Also, the United Nations Report of 1997, whichwas influenced by Sen’s (1992) concept of poverty, specifically refers to capa-bility failure defined as “poverty as the failure of basic capabilities to reachcertain minimally acceptable levels.” If this topic is situated in an internationalcontext, we discover the same phenomenon of the naturalization of social in-equalities and poverty without any underlying presumption or expectation ofequality. Thus we can think about the various structural ways that the family,market and state articulate to produce social welfare services such as: nursingcare, child care, education, and medical needs. We can focus on these areas be-cause the greatest variation between developing and developed countries ex-


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ists in these domains. Our premise is that in developing countries the state andmarket sectors are still weak, but the family is the central structure withinwhich differences exist and are expressed within society.

More clearly, the family is the basic locus of the provision of human ser-vices including care of older people, children, and the fundamental necessitiesof life related to general bodily maintenance. The family has long been thesource of such resources, but in Japan, these responsibilities fell squarelywithin the purview of the family in the Meiji Era (1868-1911) with the statesupporting the institutionalization of the patriarchal family and the ideology offamilialism through structural means, including civil codes and laws. Thistrend eventually resulted in the predominance of the nuclear family over theextended family, since the latter has been recently estimated at only ten per-cent of all families in present-day Japan (Survey of Japanese Citizens, 2002).

In the case of America’s specific brand of familialism, it has been defined asa “familialistic welfare regime,” i.e., a program that is based on placing the im-petus of welfare responsibility and support on the family, which has beenheavily promoted particularly through welfare reform. More substantively, fol-lowing this theoretical supposition as developed by Esping-Anderson (1999),there are usually three possibilities for providers of necessary human services:family, state, and market. Whenever we find intergenerational poverty, we canassume that there are structural causes driving it, whether or not the structuresinvolved are invisible or visible.3 At this point, we may compare Japan and theU.S. because even though the latter is characterized as a “country of individual-ism” (Bellah, Madsen, Sullivan, Suider and Tipton, 1983), an analysis of GDPindicators comparing the amount of money spent on human services and educa-tion illustrates that the financial burden imposed upon the family is quite sub-stantial in both countries. For example, public social expenditures as apercentage of GDP shows both Japan (14.7 percent) and the U.S. (14.6 percent)have very low rankings. This may be compared to the E.U. average of 24.5 per-cent with Sweden (31.0 percent) at the top (Operation for Economic Co-opera-tion and Development, 1980-1998).

Additionally, according to the OECD (Observer-Supplement, 2003), as apercent of social security transfers to GDP, Japan is listed at 10.3 percent andthe U.S. at 11.3 percent. Sweden was again at the top with 17.4 percent. Withrespect to spending on educational institutions as a percent of GDP, Japan waslisted at 3.52 percent, the U.S. at 4.90 percent and Sweden with 6.45 percent.Thus it can readily be seen that the family in the U.S. and Japan must bear asignificant burden for social expenditures. From this point of view, both Japanand the U.S. are similar with highly developed market economies, but this eco-nomic development is dependent upon the family to provide critical servicesnecessary in the lives of human beings. The problem is additionally com-


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pounded in the U.S. by issues of race and ethnicity, which intersect with cul-tural values as well.

While individualism is often cited as the heart of Western ideology, it is ac-tually “familialism,” which shapes, drives and permeates American historicaland current philosophical and political debates. The idea of family responsi-bility has a long history rooted in the Elizabethan Poor Laws of 1601 and hasbeen carried forward from colonial times (Schmidtz and Goodin, 1998). Thisideology encompasses the requirement that every person who is unable towork must be supported by a relative, be it a parent, grandparent, or child. Ithas been historically asserted that if too much money is provided by the state,it might undermine the necessary and required sense of family responsibilityand familial duty (Takano, 1985; Malthus, 1826). Recent discourse in theU.S. on privatization, empowerment, and personal responsibility continues tobe underpinned by this basic way of thinking mirroring the family as the nexusof economic support. In fact, welfare state policies were developed as a directoutgrowth of not only disastrous market failures, but also “family failures,”where historical networks of family and kin were insufficient to meet the for-midable task of providing a social safety net (Folbre, 2001).

While the rise of capitalism has been linked to the growth of individualism,the family has always invisibly absorbed the economic and social tension cre-ated between these two ideologies. This point is reflected even more clearly inwelfare reform debates and in the resulting new welfare assistance require-ments, which focus on supporting family members, promoting marriage andtaking responsibility for related individuals. As Seitz argues (1995), through-out the U.S., particularly in the South, Appalachia, and in many minority com-munities, people consciously use the family to provide refuge from economicdeprivation and exploitation. Families provide support in times of hardshipand function as a buffer, albeit imperfectly, against the inequalities producedby the capitalistic system (Sarnoff, 2003).

This reliance on families or the “domestication of responsibility”4 does notreflect the so-called “culture of poverty” or indicate behavioral problemscausing impoverished people to be more “dependent” than middle-class orwealthy individuals, but rather captures the reality of how capitalism has suc-ceeded in creating wealth for a few families (which is also transmittedintergenerationally), while at the same time creating extensive poverty for afar larger number of families. The lack of economic advantage is also trans-mitted through marriage and family formation, and while scholars unquestion-ingly accept the fact that massive wealth is transmitted from parents tochildren, they seem to curiously develop a myriad of problems recognizingthat poor parents also leave something to their own children as well–the lega-cies of poverty.


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METHODOLOGY

In the case of Japan, the family-based system of capitalism operates in muchthe same way as the U.S., although it is even stronger and more pervasivethroughout Japan. By using information gleaned from twenty-eight case studies,we will demonstrate a concrete connection to our theoretical foundation, andthen analyze contemporary social welfare policies, characteristics and debatesin the context of these interviews. We employed ethnographic methodology tak-ing detailed life histories, visiting informants in their homes and engaging themin their own surroundings, as well as collecting data on income, education, di-vorce, remarriage, parents, job background, etc. Conducting interviews withfamilies was extraordinarily challenging due to the issue of privacy; thus weasked for assistance from a city-based social welfare association and a semi-pro-fessional community volunteer workers organization (minsei iin jido iin associ-ation)5 to facilitate our research plan. Our plan originally called for about fiftyparticipants (families). However, approximately two weeks after our request,we were advised that only thirty-seven families would be willing to talk to us.Due to logistics and simply running short of time, we could only meet withtwenty-three participants in our one-week period of research. Later, as a point ofcomparison, we added five more cases consisting of single mothers workingfull-time. We also interviewed ten social workers and ten semi-professional vol-unteer community workers in order to obtain their perceptions of poverty andwelfare families (including female-headed families not receiving welfare assis-tance).

Research was conducted in T-city (a small industrialized town located ap-proximately one hour by train from the city of Sapporo), with all interviews ar-ranged by the city social welfare association. Each interview lasted from twoto three hours, and due to the informant’s wishes, interviews were not re-corded. Structurally, the questionnaire consisted of 104 questions organizedinto six sections as follows: Section 1–general information regarding infor-mant’s life; Section 2–history of marriage and divorce; Section 3–ramifica-tions of divorce related to finances, child care, and involvement of the courtsystem; Section 4–economic assistance from family and/or welfare programs,job training, quality of life issues, and class consciousness; Section 5–issuesrelated to children (e.g., regular school attendance, child care, and future ofchildren); Section 6–informant’s hopes for the future, remarriage, health is-sues, relationships with the surrounding community, financial problems, andideas about independence.

The total of twenty-eight cases can be broken down into two main groups:Group 1 consisted of sixteen cases involving families receiving welfare-basedpublic assistance (seikatsu hogo), child-rearing allowance (jido fuyo teate)6


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and were unemployed, except for three cases where individuals were workingin part-time unstable jobs; Group 2 included twelve cases which involvedfamilies that were receiving government child-rearing allowance, but theywere not receiving any welfare public assistance. However, six cases withinGroup 2 involved individuals who were working full-time, and four cases inthis same group involved unstable part-time work, with the remaining twocases involving individuals who were not working at all. We separated thesecases into two groups because welfare-based public assistance is the mainsafety net in Japan and, as such, is stigmatized; however, the child-rearing al-lowance does not bear a stigma since it is based on the income of employedpersons, so it is not considered welfare per se.

In general, we found the following health problems among mothers and theirchildren in Group 1: Mothers experienced asthma, dental problems, ulcers, hep-atitis C, stress, weak stomach accompanied by inability to eat, head and shoul-der aches, hernia, nervous condition after divorce, and diabetes. Children inGroup 1 had the following health issues: asthma, heart disease, Down’s Syn-drome, some learning disabilities, vomiting after eating, atopia, allergy, head-aches, diabetes, and mental disability. However, within Group 2, there were fewhealth problems reported from mothers and children.

Regarding school and job records, we found in Group 1 that most individu-als had only graduated from junior high school and dropped out of high school(junior high school is compulsory consisting of grades 7, 8, 9, and there areboth private and publicly funded schools in Japan; high school is not compul-sory and includes grades 10, 11 and 12). Ex-husbands were also junior highschool graduates and had various jobs, which were not stable before marriage.However, in Group 2, individuals had relatively stable jobs combined withmore secure overall employment records.

With respect to marriage and divorce within Group 1, there were seven (outof the total of sixteen) cases of early marriage (wives under 19 years old andhusbands were under twenty-one); on the other hand, in Group 2, there wasonly one case of early marriage. Generally, few of these early marriages werecelebrated with a formal marriage ceremony, which is extremely unusual inJapanese culture (for example, in Group 1, eight out of sixteen cases had noformal marriage ceremony, but in Group 2, there was only one case wherethere was no formal marriage ceremony). Causes of divorce, although there isundoubtedly some bias reflected in the informants’ self-reported reasons, con-sisted mostly of debt problems and domestic violence. Of the total twenty-eightcases, there were six cases, which involved remarriage after divorce. Addition-ally, the natal history of parents included within Group 1 (thirteen of sixteen)reflected a similar intergenerational job history manifesting instability andconsisting of sporadic periods of unemployment and employment. There were


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six parents in the first group who experienced divorce, but in the second groupthere were only two. Thus there is a general pattern among Group l informantsof economic instability, fragile family support or no support network, withthese vulnerabilities reflected in overall lifestyle and disadvantaged life re-sults.

STRUCTURAL CAUSES OF POVERTY AND THE TRANSMISSIONOF INTERGENERATIONAL DISADVANTAGES

Ambiguous Terminology: “Cycle of Poverty”

In a symbolic sense, the fact that many welfare families were not able to af-ford a formal marriage celebration might not be so shocking in the UnitedStates or other western countries but in Japan, it is surprising to realize thatthere are many people who do not have the financial means to arrange such aceremony. Marriage is considered one of the most important cultural events ina Japanese individual’s life and is celebrated accordingly in most families.7

More substantively, marriage is still recognized as a cultural marker of the be-ginning of one’s adult life, and yet many members of welfare families are ex-cluded from even this most basic societal expectation. This exclusion, in asense, marks them as automatically outside the mainstream of Japanese cul-tural and social life and is a defining indicator of status or lack thereof, whichradiates throughout their entire lives.

However, it is easy to understand why most families receiving governmen-tal assistance could not afford anything other than the necessities of life, due tothe fact that most parents are engaged in unstable and low-wage jobs, e.g., astruck or taxi drivers, part-time farmers, working as fishermen or in variousself-employed businesses. Some workers in our survey had undergone loss ofwork, due to the closing of the coal mine industry in Hokkaido. Coal mininghad been one of the major employers throughout the prefecture during the1960s, and thus had provided stable employment until the 1970s when jobsstarted to decline steadily. A few of our informant families were able to main-tain jobs with large pulp companies and Japan’s national railway companyproviding relatively high salaries and regular employment. Household econo-mies were rendered unstable not only because of low-wage and irregular em-ployment, but also because of violence, which eventually resulted in bitterdivorces and, in turn, further alienated parents and children. It is axiomaticthat it is not only a lack of economic capital which is the singular cause of pov-erty or the isolated reason for the transmission of a multitude of disadvantages.However, the presence of a stable income can function as a springboard to es-


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cape from an impoverished environment. If they are not able to utilize such anadvantage, then the next generation of poor children will have a high probabil-ity of themselves living in poverty during their own lifetime.

The single mothers in our survey experienced severe hardships and anxi-eties as a result of little or no support from parents or kinship networks, whichtranslated into a variety of problems. Early deaths or divorce of parents and theconcomitant problems of violence and poverty doggedly followed themthroughout their lives, not only during their childhood but persisted into theirown marriages and subsequent roles as parents. Experiences of fighting anddomestic violence were particular high in Group 1 with constant uproars in thehome contributing to a general lack of security for parents and children result-ing in broken families. Poverty facilitates divorce, stress, health problems, avariety of illnesses and even early deaths in an unbroken cycle, which is mostcertainly not due to a lack of cultural or family values much less personal-ity/character flaws, but is based on a clear pattern of structural violence(Farmer, 2003). The following narrative will illustrate common scenes experi-enced by informants, which situates them in this pattern of violence leavingthese individuals with few viable options:

My father was a violent drunk and was often violent with my mother.There were terrible scenes like my drunken brother getting into a fightwith my dad and pouring kerosene all over the room and breakingdishes. I wanted to go to high school, but I also wanted to escape frommy home as early as possible. Anyway, I found a job, which providedroom and board, as soon as I graduated from junior high school.

Many of our informants were afraid that their children would repeat thesame mistakes that they, as parents, had made. While many parents worked aswaitresses, bar hostesses, outside day-laborers, and part-time workers, theyfervently wished that their children would be able to somehow find a way outof poverty. In other words, they hoped that their children would do better thanthey had, but still struggled to overcome violent behavior toward their ownchildren.

Although I often see TV programs about child abuse, I cannot stop my-self from doing it. I hope my kids can learn a trade or develop some skill,so they won’t become like me.

Although parents hoped that children would acquire skills in various trades,the educational expectations that mothers receiving welfare assistance (Group1) have for their children represent only minimalist hopes, such as graduatingfrom high school. Mothers in the second group analyzed have more expansive


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dreams, including the desire that their children should graduate from college.Thus we see evidence that even in the early stages of children’s education, par-ents are lowering or raising their expectations according to their own life expe-rience and realities.

As part of this reality, there are laws that are applied to welfare recipients,which structurally prohibit them from accumulating savings in any institution-alized savings program, including saving money for children’s high school ed-ucation. Therefore, aggregation of money becomes fundamentally moredifficult in terms of the basic mechanism of saving. As an example of thestructural impediments to saving money, approximately twelve years ago, aJapanese woman receiving welfare assistance had saved money for her chil-dren’s education. However, she was forced to cancel the savings at the requestof the social welfare office, since the money was defined as income. Shebrought a lawsuit against the government and won her case in Japan’s Supe-rior Court in 2004. This represents a classic example where a welfare recipientsaved too much money and was summarily threatened with losing welfarebenefits.

However, in the case of other single mothers, they are free to use multifac-eted saving strategies and programs in order to put aside a little money for theirchildren’s education every month. Expenses for children’s education vary de-pending upon whether or not the school is private or public. In junior highschool, costs of public schools are estimated at a minimum of $1700 per yearwith this expense including school supplies, travel fees, money for schooltrips, but not including special “cram school” fees (cram schools offer privatelessons and tutorials to enter a prestigious university or school). Private juniorhigh schools are much more costly, running approximately $10,000 per year.An interesting point regarding junior high education is that Japanese citizenscan receive governmental assistance to pay only for compulsory junior highschool education. However, in the case of public high schools, costs escalateto $3500 per year, and private high schools will entail a parental investment ofapproximately $8000 per year with no available governmental assistance pos-sible with the exception of scholarships (The Ministry of Education, Culture,Sports, Science and Technology, 2004). Parents must either save the money orborrow the money through a government-sponsored or private institution loanprogram.

In this case, the state facilitates the lack of accumulation of financial assetsfor the poorest of families, which in turn operates to reduce any equal opportu-nity for aggregation of family capital. This practice can be viewed as a conver-gence of violations against the economic and political rights of individuals,which occur within diverse and complex social fields (Farmer, 2003). Thusmore accurately, we should frame discussions in terms of the “structural


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reproduction of intergenerational poverty,” instead of the ambiguous terminol-ogy “cycle of poverty,” which obfuscates the reproduction aspect of transmis-sion.

Voices of Single Mothers

Generally, the two groups of single mothers analyzed shared many of thesame problems, such as lack of money, jobs, children’s education and hous-ing. Public assistance contributes greatly to the maintenance of their daily life,but obtaining full-time employment is a difficult issue to resolve. This lack ofresolution is related to their low-level educational record, lack of job experi-ence, and the fact that they quit work after marriage, as well as the inadequatebut expensive child-care system. Within the context of these similarities be-tween the two groups, there were some disjunctures between the groups aswell. Group 1 single mothers were unable to articulate their future hopes in aclear way because of irregular hours of employment and no child-care support.The following narratives from informants illustrate the difficulties encoun-tered, as well as the possibilities, of securing employment in Japan’s post-wel-fare state. For example, according to one informant:

When my case worker asked me what happened with my part-time job, Iexplained that my boss wanted me to come in on Sundays. However,there are no reasonably priced child-care facilities open on that day.Also, my mother works as a live-in cleaning lady at a local hot springshotel, so she cannot care for my children. So, I feel my future will in-volve continuing to receive public assistance.

When another informant was asked about her feelings of independence, sheresponded that she couldn’t even begin to think about such a thing. A city of-fice worker told her to go to the “Hello Work” office (government-sponsoredemployment center), but at this office the only work available was irregularpart-time employment for a couple of hours per day.

Going to that office has no meaning for me. Actually, I visited the “HelloWork” Office with my 16-year-old son, a high-school dropout. How-ever, the office worker told us he was too young to get a job there. Myson told them he wants to work, and I told him he has to work, but nowhe is discouraged and does nothing. We are both left without hope andare just hanging around the house.

However, a different informant comments regarding a more hopeful out-look on her future possibilities of employment and independence.


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I really want to be independent, so even if I get only $500 per month byworking at my part-time job, I can still receive the child-rearing allow-ance. If I can get both amounts, it totals $1000 per month, so I can get bysomehow. From April, I plan to put my children in child-care facilitiesand find a job. Then, I can cut the amount of welfare assistance that I re-ceive, and I’ll be even more independent.

In the above-cited interviews, women mention alternating feelings of givingup and defiance regarding their attempts at becoming economically independ-ent through employment. However, their efforts, struggles and successes are in-visible to the surrounding society and neighbors; therefore they are exposed tounwarranted and uninformed criticism from individuals who have little sympa-thy for and even less knowledge about the real lives of single mothers.

Structural Reproduction of Intergenerational Poverty

Female-headed families in Japan are discriminated against throughout so-ciety, not only in jobs and hiring but through active prejudice, which creates adisadvantaged environment in general. Even so, some mothers are able tomaintain their confidence in raising their children, but it is difficult to do sowithout parental support. For single-mother families from middle or upperclasses, it is expected that they will receive financial and emotional supportfrom their own parents (Takamura and Okuyama, 2001; Hokkaido minsei iinjido iin renmei, 1996, 2004). If there is a divorce or violence in the family, theycan readily move to their parents’ house and stay, at least, temporarily. Parentsalso may function as baby-sitters, enabling mothers to have the ability to workfull-time. However, in many of our informants’ cases, they didn’t have the ad-vantage of such taken for granted familial support. Additionally, after divorce,most of these women received nothing from ex-husbands or from in-laws interms of emotional or economic assistance, including even a temporary placeto stay. Not being able to receive help from parents in a society where assis-tance and family connections are considered natural translates into a huge dis-advantage. This becomes a significant factor after divorce, as job informationfrom parents and relatives via the proverbial grapevine is a critical asset in re-covering financial stability and independence. It is often said in Japan thatconnections and contacts are invaluable resources to which, of course, impov-erished mothers and their parents have no possible access. Thus in Japaneseculture, it becomes a critical issue as to whether or not children receive assis-tance or support from parents. This factor becomes even more vital in fe-male-headed families where the line between survival and not surviving isquite tenuous.


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Many government and caseworkers stubbornly persist in advocating vari-ous myths regarding the family. These illusions regarding the family includethe idea that if only the family members work hard together they will be able tosucceed. The ideology of familialism has long been the foundation of Japanesesociety, and although recent corporate restructuring, a collapsing job marketand rampant downsizing have significantly weakened the position of the typi-cal male breadwinner, who economically supported the family assisted by afull-time housewife, family ideology still exists and is important, as its perva-sive influence is woven into Japanese life in hundreds of ways.

The prejudice against individuals receiving welfare can be illustrated byconversations with government support system employees, caseworkers andcommunity semi-professionals, who were interviewed in order to ascertaintheir attitudes to poor people. Many of these caseworkers had similar beliefs asother members of Japanese society, i.e., they believed that the welfare cashpayments are too high compared to other residents in the neighborhood. Al-though this means that there are a lot of low-income welfare families living inthe same area, caseworkers seldom acknowledged that welfare families fre-quently lack not only economic capital but cultural and social capital as well,and these factors are reflected throughout their generational life histories(Coleman, 1988; Bourdieu, 1986).

Discrimination against welfare families leads to more general exclusionsfrom mainstream society, which further alienates welfare recipients, and inturn leads to the invisibility of poor people; hence the overall invisibility ofpoverty, as a social problem, is crystallized. Intergenerational poverty is char-acterized by the practice of intermarriage among members of fragile families,which is an ongoing, self-replicating phenomenon. Ironically, within Japan’scapitalistic arena, family responsibility is considered more important than in-dividual responsibility, and differences in family resources are ignored, whileconcomitantly Japan’s overall international economic performance, as a coun-try, is viewed as the penultimate goal. The convergence of these influenceshave led to greater impoverishment, which has not been experienced since Ja-pan’s rise as an economic world power after the Pacific War.

JAPAN’S POST-WELFARE STATE

Japan has now entered the post-welfare stage of governmental policy due tothe unquestioned adoption of a market economy-centered principle. The adop-tion of this principle has facilitated a retreat in the state’s role in alleviatingpoverty and has led to a more stratified society through a fallback dependenceon family-centered resources (Tachibanaki, 1998; Sato, 2000). Cultural dis-


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course positions meritocracy as the basis of ongoing structural change, but thisis only partly true because diametrically opposed to this meritocracy is the es-sential and embedded reliance on the family system with its inequality of re-sources. As in the United States with its recent backward trends regardingwelfare policy, which shift the financial and economic burdens inherent in acapitalist society to the family, Japan follows America’s example in order tomaintain its competitive position in the world economy. The Japanese govern-ment advocates the cutback of child-rearing allowances and extols the inde-pendence of single mothers through getting a job. The following quote is takenfrom a Ministry of Health, Labor and Welfare Public Policy Announcement,No. 102, dated March 19, 2003, “Regarding single mother families, we have toreconsider policies centered on child-rearing allowances, and place the mainemphasis on welfare services, which support and promote the independence ofsingle mothers through work.”

At the same time that this policy is undergoing implementation, low-incomehouseholds (including, but not limited to, female-headed households) and mid-dle-class families are economically more fragile. Although Japan is frequentlycited as the country with the highest rate of savings in the world, over twentypercent of households in the year 2003 actually had no savings (Over twentypercent, 2003). Furthermore, one-tenth of compulsory school-age children re-ceived financial assistance for schooling (shugaku enjo8 in the 2003 academicyear, and the number of recipients of this governmental assistance has increased1.5 times from 1998 to 2002) (One-tenth receive, 2003).

Household income differentials have been increasing in Japan, just like inthe United States, which is facilitating a stratified society through educationalachievement or lack thereof (Kariya, 2000; Aoki, 2003). State policy in Japancan be described as Janus-faced with programs to strengthen the family butwhich also place limitations on poor families as a group. For example, accord-ing to the present discussion regarding the welfare assistance system by gov-ernment officials, there is scant attention given to the fragility of the workingpoor and impoverished families but rather, the focus is centered on the overallfinancial condition of the nation and/or a discussion of the moral dangers of“welfare dependence.” In a proposal entitled “Basic Principles of the BudgetPlan for 2004,” recommended to the Ministry of Finance by the governmentfinancial council on September 6, 2003, the following statement was pre-sented, “Public assistance should function as a safety net of last resort. . . .However, due to the moral dangers and lack of independence, which are inher-ent in welfare assistance, we should re-evaluate the levels of income guaran-tees and the process of managing and providing such assistance.”

It was also implied in the same document that it is necessary to reconsiderthe additional amounts of economic aid to single welfare mothers and children


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with respect to curtailing these amounts. Thus the current discussion about re-structuring welfare state policies is predicated upon the separation of singlemothers on welfare and the overall problem of poverty, especially the condi-tion of fragile working families. The arbitrary splitting of these two problems(Kilty and Segal, 2003) within a politically contextualized forum is leading toongoing class bipolarization in Japan promoting “family values and responsi-bility,” with its foundation in inequality of resources and rags-to-riches ideol-ogy that if one only works hard enough, anything can be achieved. Thiscultural discourse masks the problem of the growing number of impoverishedpeople preempting any real discussion on the meaning of individual responsi-bility in Japanese society and functions in the same way as it does in theUnited States.

CONCLUSION

In the mass and print media in Japan, there is once again an ongoing discus-sion regarding the “undeserving poor” without any deeper consideration of thestructural causes of poverty and inequality, while ignoring issues involvingsocial justice. Critical factors in this lack of dialogue regarding impoverishedpeople relate to the fact that mechanisms of inequality and social exclusionfunction invisibly, while concomitantly the philosophy of individualism,shaped by rhetoric based on neo-conservatism imported from the UnitedStates, blames the individual for her/his poverty. Additionally, Japan reflectsthe U.S.-instigated global shift to neo-liberal ideology advocating downsiz-ing, deregulation and privatization of once supervised governmental agencies(the Highway Department is the most recent example in Japan), and theplanned takeover by corporations of the country’s hugely successful nationalsavings program administered by the government post office system. A con-comitant strategy of this neo-liberalism policy in Japan supports programsaimed at rolling back welfare services and new welfare-to-work policies,which force single mothers receiving governmental assistance into low-pay-ing jobs.

Furthermore, state policy has historically inculcated in the Japanese popu-lation a mythic sense of familial ideology focusing on hierarchical relation-ships between parents and children. This variant of family ideology in Japan ismanifested through a dependence on family resources in upper-middle-classfamilies, which is reified as natural, uncontested and thus invisible. Throughthe implementation and continuing application of this political strategy, edu-cation and social welfare programs can effectively ignore the burdens and in-


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equalities experienced by low-income families and more substantively,actually facilitate the disadvantages of these families in Japanese society.

The reproduction of intergenerational poverty is a phenomenon, whichclearly accompanies market economies and produces severe inequalities inwealth among families, with the state polities mediating and reinforcing thissystem through the promotion of “family values” and fomenting a discourse ofmean-spirited “scare tactics.” These state-sponsored strategies include theidea of excluding women who do not have children from receiving social wel-fare services, prohibition of the accumulation of savings by welfare families,promulgation of ominous forecasts regarding the impending failure of socialservices, recent contractions in the provisions of child care allowances, as wellas reduced welfare assistance for single mothers.

This article has advocated a theoretical framework to make invisible pov-erty visible by exposing the intergenerational transmission of wealth and pov-erty in families, as both are created within a capitalistic society. Additionally,capitalism itself is historically and fundamentally grounded in familial ideol-ogy and inequality in family resources, and these factors profoundly resonatein Japan, as well as in the United States. The interaction between these twosystems, capitalism and familial ideology, creates a blinding synergism diffi-cult to penetrate and perhaps more difficult to separate. The theoretical argu-ment advanced in this research challenges Japanese society to interrogate theunquestioned acceptance of American-based individualism, which actuallyrests upon the foundation of the family, as well as the naturalization of the reli-ance on family resources or the lack of advantage imparted to families withoutsuch resources. In so doing, we may promote the concrete development of so-cietal awareness regarding the escalating problems of the working poor andlow-income families. At this juncture, we also have the rare opportunity offormulating a true expression of individualism, rather than the distorted indi-vidualism that is presently pervasive throughout Japan.

NOTES

1. The latest public-opinion poll regarding people’s lifestyle conducted by the Japa-nese government reported that 67 percent of its citizens feel dissatisfaction and anxietyabout living conditions in the country. This is the highest percentage recorded in Ja-pan’s recent history (Asahi Newspaper, August 31, 2003).

2. In Japan, public housing refers to apartments or small, detached houses for low-income households, which are administered by the municipality. Occupation of thesegovernment-funded housing programs is based on annual income.

3. Esping-Anderson (1999) has discussed “comparative welfare regimes” in west-ern countries using the term “de-familialization.” However, regarding this term and itsusage, child-care and home-helper services are included, but the burden of educational


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expenditures to families are not incorporated. We argue that educational services forindividuals and families is one of the most critical provisions of the welfare state be-cause if these services were implemented the inequality among family resources wouldbe greatly ameliorated.

4. We use this term to emphasize the retreat of the state in providing a hedge againstthe rampant bipolarization of rich and poor with the concomitant effect of shifting eco-nomic burdens to impoverished individuals who seek relief in families. However, thesefamilies are unable to function as “shock absorbers” for ongoing capitalist development.

5. The minsei iin jido iin can be translated as “Welfare Volunteers and Child Wel-fare Volunteers.” The group is composed of private volunteers commissioned by theMinistry of Health, Labor and Welfare to conduct private voluntary welfare activities.

6. The child-rearing allowance system is separated from the public assistance program.Essentially, the child-rearing allowance recipients include a mother or other persons hav-ing custody of, and rearing a child (18 or younger or a child under 20 with specific dis-abilities) who does not receive income from the father due to the parent’s divorce, etc.The public assistance program is a system which provides necessary assistance to allpeople who are destitute in accordance with their level of needs. This system is intendedto guarantee minimum living standards and to enhance independence. The system con-sists of seven kinds of aid: basic living expenses, education aid, housing aid, medical aid,maternity aid, occupational aid and funeral aid. One or more of these aid programs is of-fered in accordance with the needs of each person who qualifies for assistance.

7. While it’s true that couples marrying without a formal marriage ceremony havebeen increasing recently in present-day Japan, based on the informant’s generation itwas clear that they could not afford to have a formal ceremony. This is different fromthe recent tendency for younger couples who consciously make a decision not to have awedding celebration. This new trend is due to the fact that some young people feel it iswasteful to hold an expensive wedding or wedding reception; however, within the con-text of the cultural background of Japan the lack of such a ceremony greatly affectsone’s overall status.

8. The School Education Law compels the government to provide financial supportto municipalities when they give aid to economically disadvantaged students. Con-cretely, students can receive school supplies, school meals, and assistance for schooltrips and free or reduced price medical services.

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Documents

Invisible Poverty in Japan: Case Studies and Realities of Single Mothers