Defining the poor in early twentieth-century Japan

Abstract

The Japanese government introduced new social welfare policies and institutions during the late 1910s and 1920s that acknowledged the growing significance of the ‘social question’ in Japan and seemingly recognized that social and economic structures were responsible for an increasing number of urban poor. However, a moralistic approach to the solution of poverty remained prominent, which aimed at ‘guiding’ and ‘correcting’ poor families' behaviour, values and ‘thought’. This revealed the persistence of an assumption that the poor were poor due to their individual moral failings. The Relief and Protection Law of 1929 and social welfare institutions and practices defined the poor as morally undeserving and thereby marginalized and marked them as inferior to respectable members of Japanese society. Not only was relief inadequate to raise the poor out of poverty; discriminatory treatment and stigmatization excluded the poor from being full members of Japanese society, a situation that still affects Japanese social welfare policies and social attitudes today.