Recent commotions on financial markets have underscored the fact that neoliberal reforms and destatization have not brought us the advantages of competition, but the sellout of governmental steering mechanisms that can protect the common good and prevent the splitting up of society into haves and have-nots. The past decade has seen the coming into existence in many advanced countries, including Japan, of a "precariat" ("precarious proletariat") of people struggling with short-term jobs to make ends meet, as well as a new underclass of the socially excluded.
According to Toshiaki Tachibanaki, one of Japan's foremost economists who predicted the collapse of the self-declared "middle class-society" a decade ago, today some 14 percent of Japan's population are living in poverty, twice as many as 20 years ago.
For most readers of this paper it is hard to imagine what it means to be poor in Japan, because except for some blue tarpaulin tents of the homeless set up on river embankments, poverty is not all that visible. To the attentive observer, though, the plight of those who fell by the wayside of Japan's economic restructuring during the 1990s is quite obvious. Meanwhile, analyzing poverty, its causes and its reality, has become a growing field of social theory. In Japan, where until recently the notion of a harmonious society in which everyone benefited from economic growth had some measure of credibility, this is painful and embarrassing.
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