VISITORS to Japan rarely encounter the usual markers of privation. Housing is not run down. The urban homeless are out of sight, in makeshift tents in public parks or down by river banks. Japanese cherish a belief that theirs is an egalitarian society. So high poverty among children should come as a shock.
Official figures on child poverty were not even published until 2009. They show that the rate of (relative) child poverty—defined as the proportion of children in households with income after tax and transfers of less than half the national median household income—rose from 11% in 1985 to 16% in 2012, one of the highest rates among OECD countries. The gap between well-off and poor children is more pronounced in Japan than in America, and not far off levels in Mexico and Bulgaria, said Unicef last month.
Couples who both work in low-paid irregular or contract jobs, which now make up around two-fifths of all employment, are particularly badly off. But roughly a third of poor children live with divorced or widowed single mothers. Akiko Kamon, a single mother of two young boys in a hard-up area of Osaka, says she struggles...Continue reading
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