Abstract
Japan’s last urban housing safety net has undergone several important evolutions since the late 1990s, with the gradual establishment of homelessness policies. Prior to that, there had only been two options for people to get out of homelessness—either by earning a living as a day labourer in the so-called yoseba, a flophouse district developed in metropolitan areas, or by entering a welfare facility, such as a shelter under the Livelihood Protection Act or an emergency hospital that was available to people in poor health. However, once the homelessness policy was implemented, self-reliance support centres, lodging facilities for welfare recipients (Article 2.7 of the Social Welfare Law) and even private rental apartments became available to the homeless. In Tokyo’s case, Shinjuku became a new hub for homelessness assistance in the late 1990s and eventually an important base for the newly consolidated housing safety net, along with Tokyo’s yoseba—San’ya. In addition, especially since the late 2000s, new facilities and assisted apartments for the homeless were dispersed throughout the metropolitan area, and the containment of “visible poverty” into concentrated venues began to weaken. However, the increase in service hub functions in the western subcentre of Tokyo must be recognised as a geographic feature of this new housing safety net. On the other hand, Osaka’s service hub is strongly confined to its yoseba, Kamagasaki, which continues to serve as an important hub for the housing safety net, stifling gentrification. This led to the new housing safety net playing a different role in Tokyo and Osaka due to differences in social resources and built environment at the local scale.
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Notes
- 1.
These facilities are designed under the Livelihood Protection Act, Article 38. This shelter assistance offers only gender-based assistance to selected people who qualify for a particular facility. Hospitals that provide to people who fell sick by the wayside are also regarded by the specific law as shelters.
- 2.
In contrast to relief and rehabilitation facilities, these programmes are not provided by the Livelihood Protection Act but are created by municipalities outside of the welfare framework provided by the central government.
- 3.
Lodging facilities are run under Article 2 of the Social Welfare Act.
- 4.
The NPO National Network for Homeless Assistance carried out a nationwide survey of counting the number of those exiting homelessness through welfare offices and NPO homeless assistance organisations in 2010. By using this outcome, this NPO estimated the percentage share of the above four routes of exiting homelessness.
- 5.
Nationwide surveys on the number of rough sleepers in Japan started in 2003. At that time, 25,296 people were counted; in the latest survey of 2018, it was 4977 people.
- 6.
The Ministry of Health, Labour and Welfare conducted interview surveys of homeless people in urban areas in 2003, 2007, 2012 and 2016. The number of respondents was 2100 at the beginning and 1,300 in the latest survey. This survey was conducted according to the basic action programme of the Homeless Act (MHLW 2016).
- 7.
For Kasai, who was the leading figure in the Shinjuku movement, this was a bitter decision—he wanted to respect that the homeless could be independent on the streets. At that time, the movements that collaborated with the government formed NPOs to promote social business, and those who stayed in pure social action groups without forming relations with the government tended to be split between pro- and anti-government (Kasai 1999).
- 8.
Usually, the central government covered 75% of livelihood protection expenses, and the remaining 25% were provided by local governments.
- 9.
A leading researcher on poverty, Iwata (2017: 244), provides crucial insights for urban spatial structure-making by proposing an interpretation of poverty geographies that is pathbreaking for the understanding of Tokyo. She argues that “poverty in the form of vagrants and street children, shacks and slums, abandoned coal mining areas and remote areas or yoseba has not drawn attention through statistical figures but through their specific landscapes of poverty. Their existence was confirmed by the resistance and revolt with which the people responded, or by the discriminatory gaze with which society looked on them”. The urban space of yoseba is reflected well as “landscape” in the actions of society, giving birth to particular politics of place, such as the San’ya Policies or the Airin Policies in Osaka.
- 10.
This led to the introduction of a new system by the central government of “residential facilities to support daily living” from 2020, which subsidised staff expenses and clarified building standards. In the process of enactment, a study committee was held under the push of NPOs, and the central government institutionalised it.
- 11.
The concepts of “emplacement” and “redensification” refer to inner-city regeneration strategies to counter anti-value in the land created by depopulation. The term “emplacement” refers to the practices of attracting certain population groups with certain capabilities and possibilities of creating land benefits, yet lacking the common suspects of gentrification, such as: (1) attracting affluent groups and (2) the intrusion of aggressive real estate capital, displacement or disposition. The term “redensification”, however, refers to strategies for finding alternatives to former forms of condensed and rapid urbanisation, which have historically been vital for creating and sustaining land values and the local economy.
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Mizuuchi, T., Nakayama, T. (2023). From Confinement to Dispersion: The Changing Geographies of Homeless Policies and the Last Housing Safety Net in Tokyo. In: Mizuuchi, T., Kornatowski, G., Fukumoto, T. (eds) Diversity of Urban Inclusivity. International Perspectives in Geography, vol 20. Springer, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-19-8528-7_17
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