The most common description of poverty sounds like “poverty is the state of having little or no money and few or no material possessions.” For me poverty is about the lack of opportunities to get out of the state of having little or no money and few or no material possessions. According to my description of poverty, there is absolutely no poverty in Japan!

Japan has some form of socialism based on capitalistic principles. As the second largest economy in the world it has only two representatives in the Forbes’ 100 billionaires list! (#76 Tadashi Yanai & family, #93 Kunio Busujima & family) How can that be possible? In Japanese society there a very good distribution of wealth, it is very difficult to become very rich. On the other hand it is very simple to become middle class. To be in the middle class a person doesn’t need to graduate from a university; completing high school is enough education! There is absolutely no need to have any special skills because usually all job tasks are formalized and easy to do even for unprepared employees. Of course if a person graduated from a good university or has special skills he/she can become upper middle class citizen rather easily.

I’m not saying that there aren’t any homeless people or people with very low income in Japan. Such people do exist in Japan but usually they are okay living like that! They are barely forced to live like that. They made a personal decision to live such a lifestyle. Even though the unemployment rate in Japan has risen significantly due to the global financial crisis, it is still one of the lowest rates in the world at less than 5%. There are a lot of vacant low pay positions in Japan. Absolutely everybody can apply for a position at McDonald’s or similar place with salary of at least 10USD per hour. Working full-time at one of these places would allow Japanese to rent an apartment and cover other living expenses without problem. Every Japanese person has a chance to get out of poverty and that is why I think poverty in Japan doesn’t exist.

-O.

The Second Opinion:

Japan is a very egalitarian country and has produced an extremely strong middle class. However, I’m not entirely convinced that people who are homeless or struggling to get by do so by their own choice though.  There is a huge stigma in Japan that goes with older people being out of work or looking for a new job.  They are often viewed as having something wrong with them or the new companies are worried that they will be difficult to train and upset the balance of their company with ideas from their old job.  These people may find it very difficult to keep their status in the middle class. While they can always get one of those 10USD per hour jobs it would be impossible to support a family on that salary alone.

-T!