Unemployment and Homelessness in Japan

Japan’s economic downturn pushes more onto streets, By Peter Ford, September 3, 2009, Christian Science Monitor: “By the time the police arrived at 7 a.m. last Monday to move him on from the Ikebukuro subway station where he had spent the night, Isao Ito had been awake for some time. He had been poring over the jobs section of a magazine, and he hadn’t slept well anyway. Newly arrived in the capital in search of work, he said, ‘I haven’t eaten or slept for three days. I’m alone, and I’m nervous about sleeping rough.’ Welcome to the global recession, Japanese style. As Mr. Ito has just found, perhaps nowhere else in the industrialized world is it so easy to slip from just getting by to utter destitution. Some 460,000 people have lost their jobs in Japan since the ‘Lehman shokku,’ as people here call it – the day last September when the collapse of Lehman Bros. bank triggered a worldwide financial crisis. Half of them, like Ito, were on temporary or part-time contracts that gave them no unemployment or other social security insurance…”