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Japan, the myth of the middle class, poverty, and single mothers

By Tom Aaron

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Published: 07Aug2009
Word count: 607
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Up through the 1990s, you could meet hundreds of Japanese people and they would all be middle class. According to Roger Pulvers, this sense of belonging to the middle class came into vogue with the economic boom of the 1970s and 80s. Japanese all understood each other using what Japanese called ishindenshin, a Japanese phrase meaning that Japanese could understand each other without talking. Then came the recession of the 1990s, the recession that has been continuing on and off since then, but mostly on.

Japanese today no longer all say they belong to the middle class. Japanese may not have been all middle class, but the difference between the rich and poor was nowhere near as great as it is today. The Japanese underclass is growing as the recession continues and single mother families increase.

A July 2006 report from the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) stated that Japan suffered from one of the highest rates of relative poverty among OECD countries. Relative poverty is the percentage of the population living on one-half or less of the median income. One OECD report stated that relative poverty in Japan in the mid-2000s was approximately 15 percent, second only to the United States. The United States had an abysmal rate of 17 percent.

An August 2007 report from the labor and welfare ministry showed that the Gini coefficient in Japan was a record high 0.5263 in 2005. The Gini coefficient, developed by Italian statistician Corrado Gini, measures the inequality of income or wealth. The closer the Gini coefficient is to one, the worse the inequality. The Gini coefficient was over 0.5 for the first time in Japan.

One-third of workers in Japan now have irregular jobs. While some of these workers do not want permanent jobs, many of them do. Due to the recession, many businesses have let go many irregular workers. Many people in their 20s and 30s cannot find permanent work.

The numbers from 2007 tell a frightening story among millions of the 45.43 million people who worked for the entire year. At the bottom, 3.66 million people earned 1 million yen or less. Moving up to between 1 and 2 million yen, there were 6.66 million people. A total of 10.32 million people earned under 2 million yen for the year, a very small sum in Japan. As the economy has continued to decline, the number is probably much greater now.

Many children from low-income families, especially single mother families, have been deprived of the opportunity for higher education. In April 2009, the situation grew even worse when government aid for single parents was terminated. In Tokyo, the aid was approximately 23,000 yen per month. Many single parents are now unable to send their children to high school.

According to Naomi Yuzawa, a professor of family policy at Rikkyo University, half of single mothers have only graduated from junior high school. They have difficulty earning enough money to enable their children to obtain higher education. Researcher Aya Abe explains that the relative poverty rate of single-mother households in 2004 was 66 percent. For households with both parents, it was only 11. Without change, poverty and lack of education will continue.

Japan seems to have embarked down the same sad path that the United States has gone down. Children of single mothers face a high chance of living in poverty and being unable to take advantage of education to improve their lives. The odds are high that they will be poor as children, remain poor as adults, and that their children, if they have them, will face the same problems. Japan and America, two of the world's richest countries are abandoning responsibility for many of their children. The question is how can this be.

Aaron Language Services on the web at http://www.aaronlanguage.com provides translation, proofreading, and online English coaching to a primarily Japanese client base.

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