Reporter | Zhao Yunxian
Edit | Yellow Moon
As long as you are good and work hard, you can at least live an ordinary life without worrying about food and clothing, most people have grown up under such an education, but I don't know when this creed began to be pried by reality. People who work all the time may just be "poor and busy", but at the age when they should be independent, they find that their little income is completely unable to leave their parents' lives, their academic qualifications may be just empty blanks, and the precious opportunities that everyone is competing for may be just a fire pit...
Male and child poverty has long been a concern in Japanese society, but it was not until the last decade that female poverty entered the public eye. In December 2011, Japan's Asahi Shimbun published an article titled "1/3 of Single Women Are Deeply Impoverished," and since then, the topic of "poor women" has sparked a lot of discussion. People who are new to this topic will inevitably feel dizzy, because the more you see actual cases, the more difficult it is to summarize what is in the case, and the form of poverty encountered by women is too difficult to grasp. In Japanese writer Hiroko Iijima's "Poor Japanese Woman" and Nakamura Junhiko's "Poor Women in Tokyo", some poor women do have labels such as "poverty of the previous generation", "low education", and "original family problems", but there are ordinary female college students and female staff members who are trapped in poverty, and even highly educated university researchers and ex-wives of senior diplomats. They are disturbed by poverty, not because of any major changes, but because of a simple and necessary decision that has led to a series of tsunamis.
The causes of poverty in Japanese women seem to be diverse, and the cases have strong particularities, but this does not mean that poverty is a consequence of individual behavior. The unfair distribution of wealth between generations, the financialization of college grants, the spread of informal employment in all walks of life and the superposition of women's realities have weakened the safety nets that stand between women and poverty. Many of the current social problems in China have been experienced in Japan to some extent, and understanding the poverty of Japanese women helps us to examine our own current situation.
<h3>Selling the Body for Study: Bursaries, Sex Industries, and Generational Differences Between Rich and Poor</h3>
In 2014, a 30-year-old Japanese woman came to the Osaka municipal government to inquire about life security, but she did not expect that the public servants would give a reply that "it is good to work in the sexual service industry". At that time, this reply triggered a tsunami of public opinion in Japan. In the eyes of the public, public officials "persuade good people to be prostitutes", with both bureaucratic perfunctory indifference and humiliation of women, but it is difficult to deny that the public official's words tell a fact - sex service work has become a major means of survival for poor women in Japan.
In general perception, women who run away from home, live on the streets and are in desperate need of money are the most likely to enter the sex service industry. An investigative interview with Japanese non-fiction writer Yuko Iijima confirms this impression. Between 2012 and 2015, she met several young women who had left their families due to domestic violence, all of whom were deeply or shallowly involved in customs and customs. Iijima notes that they often use the phrase "want to open" to refer to their aid communication work. According to her account, most of these women asked for help from other relatives and school teachers before running away from home, but rarely received responses and effective help, and some men on the street saw that they were homeless and in urgent need of money, waiting for opportunities to move, with a "gentle" attitude to induce them to sell themselves, forced by the pressure of reality, after being harassed by many times, they also "wanted to open".
However, the story of such women being abducted into the sex industry is no longer representative, and Iijima and another freelance writer in Japan, Junhiko Nakamura, found that in recent years, more and more ordinary female college students and female employees have actively chosen to work in the custom industry in order to pay tuition and rent. Because of a fortuitous coincidence, Nakamura has been involved in the sex industry since the 1990s, and since then, he has interviewed more than 1,300 adult film actresses and custom ladies, and after writing a new column on poor women for Toyo Economic Online in 2016, he became more and more aware of the changes in practitioners. Instead of being tricked and misguided, and the number of cases of bankruptcy due to excessive consumption or having to engage in customs because of their involvement in loan sharks has diminished considerably, women now choose to become sex workers in order to cover the daily expenses of 30,000 to 50,000 yen a month. With the proliferation of informal employment forms in Japan, there are fewer and fewer formal jobs to meet the expenses of single women, and women often need to find multiple part-time jobs, while convenience stores, tutors and other jobs are extremely cost-effective, and there is not much money after paying a long period of work.
"If you increase the time of part-time work, you can't guarantee the time to study, it is easy to repeat the grade... I was already very busy, and I had to find a way to spend as little time as possible to make more money, and I felt that there was only one way to go. A female student from the Faculty of Medicine of the National University of Japan said to Nakamura. In the case of economic downturn, the children of ordinary families want to have a foothold in society, usually only the road to education promotion can be taken, but the expensive tuition fees are no longer affordable by work-study like the previous generation. Today, the tuition fees of Japanese national universities are as high as 535,800 yen, a 44-fold increase from 12,000 yuan in 1996, while the annual income of Japanese families fell from 6.642 million yen to 5.602 million yen during the same period. Convenience store jobs in Tokyo cost about 1,000 yen an hour, approaching the minimum wage of 920 yen an hour, and under the condition of guaranteeing class time, a college student can only earn 40,000 to 50,000 yen per month, and it is almost impossible to complete university without parental support. In this case, a customary job that can earn thousands or even 20,000 or 30,000 yen an hour becomes the last choice.
Most of the female college students nakamura interviewed applied for college grants, which they relied on to cover tuition and daily expenses with the money earned from part-time work. However, the university bursary mentioned here does not bring any preferential treatment to students with financial difficulties, and in Nakamura's view, this is just a financial product that collects interest in the name of "bursary". In 2004, the Japanese government made a major adjustment in the funding of student funds, and the original Japan Yuying Association was reorganized into an independent administrative corporation "Japan Student Support Agency". The institution used financial investment and financing and private funds as the source of finance, and transformed the bursary into a financial industry with an annual interest rate of 3%. Due to the stringent eligibility requirements for interest-free bursaries, most students with financial difficulties can only apply for the second type of interest, and the principal plus interest debt they carry at graduation can be as high as 6 million yen. Even so, it is difficult for students to survive on a 100,000 yen a month bursary, and considering the problem of debt repayment in the future, the chances of Japanese female students engaging in sex work have increased.
According to a 2016 survey by the Japan Student Support Agency, 48.9% of japanese university students use bursaries. In Nakamura's view, such a high proportion of applications is due to the lack of concept of debt problems among young people who have just graduated from high school, and the second is because the system is formulated and promoted by the state, which is easy to gain people's trust, but like engaging in sex work, applying for college grants is also a last resort, although male students do not have a large number of self-selling behaviors, but the same pressure also forces them to carry out criminal acts such as abduction and fraud.
As soon as the interview with the female student at the Faculty of Medicine of The National University of Japan was published, a large amount of slander and slander immediately appeared on the message board. Not surprisingly, the person concerned was reduced to a "slut" with a "rigid mind", "love of money", and "shamelessness", most of whom accused her of indiscipline, and few people discussed what was wrong with society as Nakamura expected, so that ordinary women embarked on the road of prostitution. Nakamura believes that these messages are the result of Japan's generational division and misogynistic culture, and that those who came from the happy Showa era enjoyed a materially rich and carefree youth life, and accumulated wealth in the second half of their lives, and they "not only know nothing about the miserable reality of young people, but even have no interest in preaching." Female college students engaged in customs are a perfect example: young women who want to live an ordinary life have to sell their bodies to older men in order to pay for school fees, only to be humiliated and insulted again by the misogynistic culture.
<h3>The Poor and Busy In the Bureaucracy: The Expansion of Informal Employment</h3>
Miss Customs, who is seen as vulgar, hovers on the brink of poverty, while female caregivers who appear as loving and angelic are not doing much better.
Tired of the darkness of the industry, Nakamura briefly turned his attention to the nursing profession that had attracted much attention at the beginning of the century. With the aging of the population, the demand for care in Japanese society is increasing, and the nature of care has given this cause a sense of nobility and meaning. Nakamura, who thought he could escape the ugliness, found himself stepping into a "lair of an embarrassed man he had never seen before."
After entering the super-aging society, the Japanese nursing industry has always been understaffed, and it is estimated that this gap may expand to 1 million people by 2025. In response to this situation, the Ministry of Health, Labor and Welfare launched the "Key Types of Employment and Creation Business" in 2009, which plans to convert unemployed people into caregivers, provide vocational training for the unemployed with primary caregiver qualifications free of charge, and in some places also give subsidies for living expenses during the training period. But as Nakamura has seen in numerous real-life cases, not all people who go to Hello-Work (a non-profit organization that introduces job opportunities for free in Japan) are suitable for nursing work, and it can be counterproductive to cram confused people into the nursing profession without screening. One of the Harada women he interviewed had a strong dislike of the elderly because of the problem of the original family, but the relevant staff did not find this, but only wanted to send her to the nursing agency to complete the conversion of the unemployed to the nursing labor force, and the final result was to cause trouble to many parties.
What really caused chaos in the care industry was another initiative that was implemented earlier than the "key types of employment and creation of businesses". In 2000, the nursing care insurance system was officially implemented. This system outsources the care work originally undertaken by public institutions to private enterprises, and the entry threshold is very low, and some small and medium-sized enterprises that are not related to nursing care, such as ramen shops and izakaya, are also added, and some people even specialize in fraudulent nursing affairs so as to defraud subsidies. Expensive high-end nursing homes convey a hopeful and warm atmosphere to the outside world, while caregivers in most small and medium-sized institutions suffer from low wages and overwork. In view of the fact that there are more female unemployment in reality, and affected by the traditional concept of gender division of labor, 70% of the current Japanese nursing industry practitioners are women, and there are more women facing poverty problems introduced into this industry, such employment is difficult to help them out of the predicament, and the frequent illegal wage arrears and workplace bullying have intensified the contradiction. Nakamura concluded: "The nursing scene is a celebration of gratitude while being flooded with power bullying, sexual harassment, abuse and black labor. A female nurse said that she thought she could live a stable life on this job, but she never dreamed that "the world of caregivers is so dangerous."
The average income of nursing industry practitioners ranks at the bottom of the entire industry in Japan, and there is a high or low point in the last place: the average monthly salary of a formally employed caregiver is about 210,000 yen, and the informal employer can only get 170,000 yen, and for people with difficulties in life, the poor 40,000 yen is likely to be the last straw that crushes the camel, in addition, non-regular employees take on more work in the workplace, and are easily bullied, and their welfare benefits are not comparable to those of regular employees.
The squeeze on workers' rights and interests by informal employment relationships is not uniquely manifested in this industry. In 1985, Japan promulgated the Labor Dispatch Act, and with each revision, the scope of application has been expanded, and most of the administrative positions held by women have borne the brunt of the problem and become dispatch posts. In 2015, the new revised version stipulated that dispatched workers could be used indefinitely for the same position, and the law formally recognized the practice of enterprises "discarding after use" of labor. Although the Abe cabinet's goal of "a totally active society of 100 million" (ensuring that japan's population remains at 100 million in 50 years, and that everyone can be active in the family, workplace, and region) has led to many policies conducive to women's employment, Iijima believes that the beneficiaries of Abe's New Deal are only a small number of elite women, and ordinary women at the bottom may be in crisis due to the increasingly uninhibited dispatch law. After all, 40% of Japan's employees are non-regular employees, and female non-regular employees account for 60% of all female employees, which is not optimistic.
The bureaucratic poor are probably the most typical consequence of the informal employment system. The area where the Labor Dispatch Act has advanced the fastest is precisely the area that symbolizes a stable civil service. During the Koizumi era, when subsidies for local governments in Japan were cut, government agencies began to outsource some functions, handing over the affairs that were originally undertaken by public officials to non-regular employees, and the positions of window receptionists, librarians, nurses, and nurserymen, which were mainly held by women, were informalized one by one, and women who seemed to be doing decent work lived precarious and futureless lives.
"Because I don't have any money, I hardly eat, play or shop outside, and I work, do housework, study every day, and live a lonely and monotonous life." Although I am not dissatisfied with the lack of excitement in life, whether she can live normally next year and the year after tomorrow has always been a lingering uneasiness in her heart. After meeting with Ms. Tanimura, Nakamura quickly grasped the general situation of this poor and busy official. Ms. Tanimura, 37, is a librarian at a public library in Tokyo, and 80 percent of its staff are non-regular workers like her. Although she did not have a formal establishment, she loved the job very much and invested a lot of time and energy in it, but her monthly salary was only 83,000 yen after deducting rent, which was equivalent to the minimum living expenses provided by the minimum living guarantee system. With the expiry of her contract approaching and her age approaching 40, Ms. Tanimura feared that she would not be able to keep even this life. "Isn't it enough to work hard and earnestly?" She said to Nakamura.
After interviewing Ms. Tanimura, a "disgusting sense of despair" struck Nakamura, and it was painful to see the hard-working woman struggling with poverty. Nakamura lamented more than once that it is always honest and kind women who devote themselves to public service for the sake of meaning, and compared with them, women who solicit dry fathers online "look happier" because the existing system is to exchange money for "the conscience and good nature of the employed".
<h3>Epilogue: Lack of security, one wrong step will lead to poverty</h3>
What is poverty? For example, Japan has regulations, and families with smart phones in the house are not poor, and families with cars cannot receive benefits, but in reality, these things that should not be owned by the poor may first be the financial support that poor people receive from their relatives and friends, and more likely to be an important tool for maintaining their difficult lives.
There are two measures of poverty in the world, one is "absolute poverty" where food, clothing, shelter and transportation cannot be basically guaranteed, and the other is "relative poverty", which is less than half the median disposable income of the whole people after the household disposable income is apportioned according to the head. In countries like Japan, the latter is generally used as a criterion for poverty. In 2007, a survey by the National Institute of Social Security and Population Studies in Japan showed that 32% of single women aged 20-64 were in poverty, and the poverty rate of elderly women over 65 years old and single-parent families was as high as 50%.
Intergenerational poverty transmission, low education, and native family problems are indeed the characteristics of some poor women, but in Nakamura's interview, there are also women from middle-class, highly educated, and strong abilities who fall into poverty. Some of them work in research labs, some are the wives of senior diplomats, and they don't look like people who can deal with poverty, but because they temporarily leave their jobs to take care of their families and divorce, their lives have changed qualitatively. After doing a four-year interview, Iijima lamented that as a single woman over the age of 30, she could fall into poverty if she "took the wrong step." Because wealth-related relationships are hidden from the family, women's underlying poverty is difficult to detect, and there is a lack of social and market peer-to-peer security and opportunities for men, and women's safety nets against poverty are even more vulnerable.
Resources:
Poor Japanese Woman, Hiroko Iijima, Nova Press, 2021
"Poor Woman in Tokyo", Junhiko Nakamura, People's Literature Publishing House, 2021