Times and Spaces of Homeless Regulation inJapan, 1950s–2000s: Historical and Contemporary Analysis

Abstract

Since the late 1970s, Atlantic Fordism has seen rising homelessness and ghettoization as the ‘new urban poverty’ (NUP) (Mingione, 1996). Despite some similarities, the NUP in Japan has a unique rhythm and spatial pattern. In order to explore Japanese NUP, this article develops an interpretation of Japan's strategies to regulate poverty and homelessness during the last 50 years, paying particular attention to the spatial consequences of such strategies within major Japanese cities. First, I theorize long‐term economic growth patterns as a basic parameter of poverty and homelessness regulation and present a periodization of Japanese trends since the 1950s. Second, I analyze poverty in Japan and the transformation of national strategies of spatial regulation in the 1990s, when homelessness grew. Third, I examine the multi‐scalar processes through which new regulatory spaces of homelessness were produced in the 1990s and 2000s, when failures of post‐bubble crisis management ballooned in Japan. I argue that, through a dialectic between national/local rule‐setting and homelessness, the Japanese state fragmented the dominant scale of poverty regulation, rescaled the site of homeless regulation and contained homelessness in relatively autonomized cities. I conclude that, from the 1990s until the late 2000s, Japan's homelessness and its contradictions tended to be transferred to the spheres of urban workfare and urban policing, which I call new regulatory spaces of homelessness, that lie around the fringes of national social rights.

Civil Society and the State in Democratic East Asia: Between Entanglement and Contention in Post High Growth.

“…In the interests of space, I largely exclude this discussion from this chapter. For the same reason, I have also omitted my discussion of politics for public space and how activists opened up parks and streets for the homeless (see Hayashi 2013Hayashi , 2018. It is sufficient for this chapter to say that the original construction of pro-homeless movements was multifaceted.…”

Urban Poverty and Regulation, New Spaces and Old: Japan and the US in Comparison

“…As the effects of these decisions took hold, the number of homeless in urban spaces counted by the Ministry of Health, Labor and Welfare decreased from 25 296 in 2003 to 15 759 in 2009. Interpreting this fact positively, the Japanese state now vigorously defends its homelessness regulation (MHLW, 2008), but some scholars have criticized the socially excluded status of the homeless (Hayashi, 2013(Hayashi, , 2014Kitagawa, 2010).…”

State Rescaling in Non‐Western Contexts

“…territorial partitionings, scalar configurations) of state spatial organization and (2) emergent state spatial projects and strategies that aim to modify or reshape the entrenched spatial form of the state. The rescaled state spaces are crisis‐ridden products with a highly complicated, variegated and fragmented nature. The articles in this symposium show that these tendencies are also observed in state rescaling processes in non‐Western countries. For example, Mahito Hayashi (, this issue) argues that poverty regulation in Japan has undergone rescaling from a nationalized space of social rights to an urban‐level workfare regime over the last 50 years, and shows how the rescaling is an outcome of various efforts to resolve crises applied to the regulatory space of poverty. More specifically, he argues that a certain regulatory space of poverty, composed of the labor market, the social fabric and public provision, is established in relation to the growth pattern of the society.…”