RIGHTS-JAPAN: Welfare Reaches Too Few with Too Little

By Suvendrini Kakuchi Reprint | | Print |

Suvendrini Kakuchi

TOKYO, Jul 16 2003 (IPS) - For seven years, a cardboard box was home for 56-year-old Uchida. Now he lives in a one-room apartment, and the concrete banks of the Sumida river in downtown Tokyo, where Uchida lived in a shantytown, seems distant.

It was not a state rehabilitation programme that took Uchida off the streets, but a fever. He fell ill last winter. ”I had to be taken to hospital to recover,” he explained. ”Then the authorities finally offered me social welfare.”

For the former construction worker, it was the first reconnection to a society that had cared little for him when he slipped out of it. ”I lived from day to day without any hope,” Uchida said. ”I did not seek government assistance because the process is too tiresome and I could not ask my family members for help as they are struggling to survive too.”

Uchida, who did not want his first name to be used, said he left his wife when he came to Tokyo, and supported himself by scavenging garbage for recyclable material, as did many of his neighbours on the banks of the Sumida. It was, he recalled, a hard life.

With no address, no social welfare and no connection to a social structure that has little room for the jobless and homeless, Uchida added to the rising number of people that modern Japan has forgotten and then stigmatised.

Professor Kunijiro Tashiro, an expert on welfare policy at Tokyo’s Rissho University, described the Japanese system as ”sadly falling short of protecting the nation’s poor” because society has traditionally not been used to having people on welfare. Yet the number of those who need help from the state is rising. According to the Health, Welfare and Labour Ministry, by the end of last fiscal year which ended in March 2003, Japan was supporting 903,000 households a month, the highest number since the start of the post-World War II era.

In 2001, the number of households was 805,169 – 37 percent more than the number in 1995.

Tashiro explained that the neglect of the poor in affluent Japan ”is the result of decades of ignoring the state’s responsibility of guaranteeing its citizens a high standard of living”.

Japanese welfare, said Tashiro, is aimed at ”encouraging self-dependence” rather than taking into consideration an individual’s crisis. Critics of the welfare policy point out that deep-rooted stereotypes that persist about the poor – that they are ”lazy” and ”second class” – continue to work against the development of a humanitarian welfare policy.

This cold approach is reflected in the provision made for welfare assistance in Japan’s national budget. At just about one percent, it is way behind similar provisions in the budgets of developed countries.

Japan’s antiquated Daily Life Protection law, established in 1950, states that the government’s safety net must ”maintain the minimum standards of wholesome and cultured living.”

The 21st century reality however is far removed from the intent of that law. Public assistance, for the lucky recipients, provides an allowance of less than 2,000 U.S. dollars per family of four, defined as parents and two children.

Payments are made toward housing and medical assistance, with municipal governments covering 25 percent of the cost. Welfare is allotted by assessing the adults’ inability to support themselves, whether they are too sick to work, whether they have young children and whether they have family support.

But the system is far from adequate. Experts point out that living on handouts still means that many can barely make ends meet – in Japan the monthly rent alone for a small two-room apartment can reach 1,000 dollars even in the suburbs of Tokyo.

Shinchi Yamamoto, a welfare official at the Kawasaki ward, acknowledges that those in need get insufficient aid. ”Payments are still way below what is needed to help a family keep up the standard of living,” he said. ”But our orders are from the central government, so we cannot do much more.”

Coverage is important to the state, but the quality of that coverage is what critics question. Japan’s Health, Welfare and Labour Ministry says 90 percent of applicants get aid, and the state recommends that local governments allot one case worker for every 80 recipients.

Yamamoto said however that it is impossible to care for the needy individually given the growing numbers of the unemployed and the bankrupt. In May 2003, the unemployment rate was up to a near-record 5.4 percent.

”Japan’s long economic recession has caused the numbers of poor people to rise,” said Jiro Watanabe, an official at the Health, Welfare and Labour Ministry. ”With fewer people, even those in their 20s and 30s, finding full-time jobs, the income gap is growing between those with high-paying jobs and those who have to settle for less.”

More than half the recipients of welfare cited salary cuts or lower pensions as the reason for seeking welfare, while 45 percent of that number were over 65 years old, people with pensions that gave them less than required to maintain the minimum standard of living.

Takumi Sakai, a volunteer at Onigiri Association, a group which provides advice on negotiating the bureaucratic maze to more than 300 homeless people, can vouch for the inadequacy of welfare in Japan.

”Welfare officials do not treat the poor, many of whom have paid taxes till misfortune struck, as having the right to a proper standard of living,” he said. ”They reject applications saying the needy have not made enough effort to find a job. The future is hopeless.”

Indeed, several cases of blatant state neglect have been reported.

In March, a 65-year-old woman was arrested for strangling her brother, who was a year older. Investigations revealed the unemployed Katsuko Ichii had cared for her seriously disabled brother for 24 years alone – and resorted to murder when she could not afford the private nursing care he needed.