The most vulnerable are hit hard by the Covid-19 crisis in Japan, while access to social assistance is difficult.
Tokyo January 9, 2021.
AFP
Yuichiro is teary-eyed as he collects his food package during a distribution in Tokyo to help the growing number of people struggling to make ends meet due to the pandemic in the world’s third-largest economy.
“There is no more work. Nothing! ”Said this 46-year-old construction worker to AFP, who only wanted to give his first name. “In Japan, the media don’t often talk about it, but a lot of people sleep in stations and in boxes. Some are dying of hunger, ”he emphasizes.
Compared to many other countries, Japan has been relatively spared from the pandemic with some 4,500 deaths since January 2020, and has not put in place strict containment. But the most vulnerable are hit hard, say associations.
“The pandemic, rising unemployment and falling wages have directly affected the working poor who were barely afloat until then,” said Ren Ohnishi, president of Moyai, a local NGO fighting against poverty.
Seen from abroad, Japan seems better equipped than average to cushion the economic shock of the pandemic, with an unemployment rate around 3% and a functional social security system. But 40% of workers are in vulnerable jobs with precarious contracts.
“The middle class is collapsing”
Access to social assistance can also be difficult: Yuichiro says he was sent from one administration to another, in vain. It was finally explained to him that priority was given to families with children. “But there are a lot of adults who don’t have enough to eat,” he laments.
More than 10 million people in Japan live on the equivalent of less than 16,000 euros a year, and one in six people live in “relative poverty”, with an income less than half of the median salary, according to figures officials.
Half a million people have lost their jobs in the past six months, according to Kenji Seino, leader of an emergency aid NGO. “It is no longer only elderly men who are affected, but also women and young people,” he notes. “The middle class is collapsing” and “those who were already on a tightrope saw it break under their feet,” adds Kenji Seino at another solidarity event in the popular Tokyo district of Ikebukuro, where 250 people came to collect food, sleeping bags or medicine.
A situation that sometimes leads to desperate acts: a 1% increase in the unemployment rate translates into 3,000 additional suicides per year, according to Taro Saito, of the NLI research institute. While the number of suicides in Japan fell in 2019 to a historically low level and continued to decline in the first half of 2020, it has started to rise again since last July. Suicide affects a growing proportion of women, who are more affected by precarious jobs.
It is also less and less rare to see women in food distribution with their children, according to Kenji Seino.
Fear of shame
With the state of emergency currently in force in 11 of Japan’s 47 departments, the government is trying to maintain an impossible balance between the risk of infection and the economic consequences of overly strict measures.
The associations are aware that many countries have much higher levels of poverty than Japan, but stress the difficulty in finding help for those in need, and the stigmatization they suffer.
“The system decrees that the priority is families. Families therefore receive letters telling them that their son has asked for help, ”underlines Ren Ohnishi. However, “many do not want their families to know that they are receiving social assistance”, a situation experienced as shameful. “It’s a very Japanese system. Everyone is entitled to it, but society does not necessarily tolerate it, ”he analyzes.
At the Ikebukuro distribution, a construction worker says his salary from the equivalent of 800 euros a year ago has plummeted, now representing just over 150 euros. “I just have enough to pay my rent again. I don’t want to be on the streets. It’s too cold, ”he says. “I don’t know exactly what I’m going to do”.
Posted: 01/19/2021, 5:20 a.m.-
