Homelessness in Japan

Based on Wikipedia: Homelessness in Japan

The Country Where Homelessness Almost Disappeared

Japan has the lowest homelessness rate in the world. Out of every thirty-four thousand citizens, only one sleeps on the streets. That's a rate of 0.003 percent, according to a 2022 study by the United Kingdom's Greater Change Foundation.

But that number hides a more complicated story.

The official count only includes people sleeping rough—those you might see bedded down in a park or under a bridge. It doesn't include the invisible homeless: people who spend their nights in internet cafés, capsule hotels, or the back seats of their cars. These are people with no fixed address, drifting through a gap in the statistics.

The Language of Being Without a Home

Japanese has many words for homelessness, and each one reveals something about how society views those without shelter.

The most neutral is hōmuresu, borrowed directly from English. Then there's furōsha, meaning "wandering person"—a term that captures the transient nature of life on the streets. Less kind is kojiki, which means beggar, and runpen, borrowed from the German word Lumpen, meaning rags.

More recently, advocates have pushed for terms like nojukusha—"person who sleeps outside"—and nojuku rōdōsha—"laborer who sleeps outside." These newer terms attempt something important: they describe a circumstance rather than defining a person by it.

This linguistic evolution mirrors a broader shift in how Japan thinks about homelessness—from moral failing to social problem, from individual shame to systemic challenge.

A Problem Born from Bubbles

To understand homelessness in Japan, you have to understand what happened to its economy in the 1990s.

For decades after World War II, Japan experienced what economists call a miracle. The country rose from the rubble of Hiroshima and Nagasaki to become the world's second-largest economy. Real estate prices soared. Stock markets climbed to dizzying heights. A square meter of land in Tokyo's Ginza district cost more than entire buildings in Manhattan.

Then, in 1991, the bubble burst.

Asset prices collapsed. Banks failed. Companies that had seemed invincible began laying off workers by the thousands. Japan entered what would come to be known as the Lost Decade—though it would stretch far longer than ten years.

Homelessness, which had been nearly invisible during the boom years, suddenly became visible on the streets of Tokyo and Osaka. By 2003, the Ministry of Health, Labour and Welfare counted over twenty-five thousand homeless people across the country—a peak that would slowly recede over the following two decades.

Who Becomes Homeless in Japan

Here's something striking about Japanese homelessness: it is overwhelmingly a problem of middle-aged and elderly men.

In surveys conducted by the government, men accounted for ninety-five percent of the homeless population. The average age was fifty-seven and a half years old. This isn't a crisis of young people struggling to get started—it's a crisis of older men who lost their footing and couldn't recover.

Why men? The answer lies deep in Japanese social structure.

Traditionally, Japanese men were expected to be the sole providers for their families. Companies valued married men, believing they worked harder because they felt more obligation to their families. This created a system where a man's identity was tightly bound to his employment.

When that employment disappeared, everything went with it.

Unmarried men over thirty-five face particular difficulties finding work in Japan. They're seen as having failed at a fundamental life milestone. Elderly men encounter ageism that makes re-employment nearly impossible. And unlike women, men in Japan historically received less family support when things went wrong.

The result is a homeless population that looks nothing like what you might expect: not young runaways, not drug addicts, but older men who worked their whole lives until the system that defined them fell apart.

The Bureaucratic Maze

Japan has a robust welfare system. In theory, anyone without income, savings, or property to meet basic necessities can receive livelihood protection—government assistance to cover food, housing, and other essential needs.

In practice, getting that assistance has been extraordinarily difficult.

For years, bureaucratic obstacles blocked homeless people from accessing benefits they were legally entitled to receive. Forms required permanent addresses. Offices demanded documentation that people living on the streets simply didn't have. Caseworkers sometimes turned away applicants who showed any sign of being able-bodied, operating under an unstated assumption that real poverty should be visibly desperate.

In August 2002, Japan passed the Special Act in regards to Supporting the Autonomy of the Homeless Population. The law's title is revealing—it frames homelessness as a problem of autonomy, of people who need support to become self-sufficient again, rather than permanent dependents on state charity.

The law defined who counted as homeless: "those who utilize city parks, river banks, roads, train stations, and other facilities as their place of stay in order to live their daily lives." This definition mattered because it determined who could access help.

The legislation also opened doors. Women escaping domestic violence could receive support from shelters and care institutions. Minors could access child welfare services. And the government launched its first nationwide survey of homelessness, finally trying to understand the scope of a problem it had long preferred to ignore.

The Rise of the Working Poor

Something else was happening in Japan that would reshape homelessness: the rise of precarious employment.

Changes to labor laws in 1986 and 1999 made it easier for companies to hire part-time and temporary workers. These jobs offered flexibility for employers but instability for workers. Pay was often at minimum wage. Benefits were scarce. Job security was nonexistent.

The numbers tell the story. In 2011, Japan had seventeen million part-time and temporary workers. By 2019, that number had grown to twenty-two million. That's a thirty percent increase in less than a decade.

This matters for homelessness because of how renting works in Japan.

To secure an apartment in Japan, you typically need to pay a deposit plus three months' rent upfront. You also usually need a guarantor—someone who will vouch for you and accept responsibility if you can't pay. For someone with permanent employment and family connections, this system works fine. For someone working temp jobs with no family support, it creates an almost insurmountable barrier.

You can work in Japan and still become homeless—not because you're not earning money, but because the housing system wasn't designed for the kind of work that's increasingly common.

The Numbers Come Down

Here's the encouraging part of the story: homelessness in Japan has been declining for two decades.

The peak came in 2003, with over twenty-five thousand people counted on the streets. By 2007, that number had fallen to just over eighteen thousand as Japan experienced modest economic recovery. By 2018, fewer than five thousand homeless people were counted nationwide. By 2020, the count was under four thousand—a twelve percent decrease from just the year before.

Where do homeless people concentrate? In 2020, the largest numbers were found in Osaka's metropolitan area, with just over a thousand people. Tokyo's metropolitan area came second with nearly nine hundred. Kanagawa prefecture, which includes Yokohama, had about seven hundred.

A government survey in 2007 found something interesting about geography: climate didn't seem to matter much. The number of homeless people in eastern Japan, where winters are colder, was roughly equal to the number in western Japan, where winters are milder. Whatever drives homelessness in Japan, it isn't people migrating to escape the cold.

The Hidden Homeless

But remember that asterisk in Japan's statistics.

For about fifteen to twenty dollars a night, a person without a home can stay in an internet café or capsule hotel. Internet cafés in Japan aren't like the dimly lit gaming centers you might imagine. Many offer private booths, showers, free soft drinks, and of course, internet access. Capsule hotels provide even more—tiny but private sleeping pods stacked like honeycomb cells.

In 2007, the government conducted its first survey of people spending nights in these establishments. They found about fifty-four hundred people across Japan either sleeping or staying up all night in internet cafés and twenty-four-hour shops.

These people don't appear in homeless counts. They have a roof over their heads each night. But they have no fixed address, no place to call their own, no stability. They exist in a gray zone that Japan's statistics weren't designed to capture.

This is one reason why Japan's remarkably low homelessness rate should be understood with nuance. The country has genuinely made progress on street homelessness. But it has also developed a category of housing insecurity that doesn't fit traditional definitions—people who are housed night by night, never knowing where they'll be next week.

What Tokyo Learned

In 1997, something significant happened. Tokyo officially acknowledged the existence of homeless group representatives and began listening to their concerns.

This might sound like a small bureaucratic step, but in Japanese culture, official recognition matters enormously. For the government to acknowledge that homeless people had representatives—that they were organized, that they had legitimate concerns worth hearing—was a shift in how the problem was understood.

By 1998, officials estimated about thirty-seven hundred homeless people in Tokyo alone. Advocacy groups put the number closer to five thousand and noted it was rising fast. The gap between official and unofficial counts reflected different ways of seeing the problem—and different levels of urgency about addressing it.

The advocates were pushing for faster action. The government was beginning to listen.

A Society Designed for Stability

Japan's experience with homelessness reveals something important about how societies handle economic change.

The postwar Japanese system was built on assumptions of stability: lifetime employment, steady advancement, predictable paths from school to career to retirement. This system worked remarkably well for decades. It produced prosperity, security, and one of the world's largest middle classes.

But it was brittle. When the assumptions broke—when companies could no longer guarantee lifetime employment, when the economy stopped growing, when the paths became unpredictable—people fell through gaps the system never anticipated.

The homeless population that emerged wasn't composed of people who had always been on the margins. It was largely made up of people who had followed all the rules, done everything they were supposed to do, and then watched as the ground shifted beneath them.

This is perhaps the most important lesson from Japan's experience: homelessness isn't just about individual failure. It's about the fit between people and systems—and what happens when that fit breaks down.

The Path Forward

Japan has made genuine progress on homelessness. The numbers are down dramatically from their peak. Support systems, while imperfect, have expanded. The legal framework for helping people has improved.

But challenges remain. An aging population means more people vulnerable to the circumstances that lead to homelessness. The growth of precarious employment continues. The hidden homeless in internet cafés represent a problem that's harder to see and harder to solve.

And the fundamental question persists: how does a society that values stability adapt when stability is no longer guaranteed? Japan is still working out its answer.

What's clear is that the country with the world's lowest homelessness rate didn't achieve that by accident. It required policy changes, official recognition of the problem, and a gradual shift in how society thinks about people who lose their housing. The Japanese word for it—nojukusha, "person who sleeps outside"—points toward that shift. Not a wanderer. Not a beggar. Just a person, in a circumstance that could change.