Solitude of Younger Street Homeless People: Experiences and Pathways

Abstract

Since the mid-1990s, Japanese society has experienced a sharp increase in the number of street homeless people. Most them are relatively old. At present, more than fifty percent of the street homeless are over fifty years old. However, in addition to the older people, we are beginning to see younger street homeless people. In this paper, I define younger as below thirty-five years. The younger people still comprise a small proportion of the street homeless people; that is, they are fewer than ten percent of the entire street homeless population. However, they should not be neglected merely because they have until now constituted a negligible-sized group. Younger street homeless people are a completely new phenomenon for the Japanese. They might be the heralds of the changing structure of Japanese society.This paper uses the life histories of younger street homeless people to describe and analyze two distinctive processes in their experiences; these processes are the “process of becoming” and the “process of remaining.” Usually, in their endeavor to explain both processes, scholars advance claims that are strongly economic. The scholars may be correct as long as their focus is on older people. However, the issue is slightly different in the case of younger people. Younger people often tell us that their job losses have been spontaneous. While such answers should certainly not be examined superficially, it is also important that the experiences and pathways of younger people be analyzed by including variables other than economic ones; these variables are the state of the social world and that of the inner world.Lastly, this paper reconsiders the experiences of younger street homeless people from a structural perspective. The combination of the theory of individualization and the theory of the urban underclass enables it to do so.