Reviewed by: Down and Out in Late Meiji Japan by James L. Huffman Maren Ehlers (bio) Down and Out in Late Meiji Japan. By James L. Huffman. University of Hawai'i Press, Honolulu, 2018. xii, 350 pages. $68.00. Picking up this volume, some readers might be reminded of an earlier work on the underclass in Meiji Japan: Mikiso Hane's Peasants, Rebels, Women, and Outcastes,1 which explored the dark side of Meiji modernization. But James Huffman's Down and Out is a different kind of book. It focuses primarily on the urban poor and portrays them not as downtrodden victims, but as people with full and memorable lives. Although Huffman leaves no doubt that he, too, sees late Meiji capitalism as an exploitative economic system, he chooses to highlight the willpower, intelligence, and ingenuity the poor had to muster to survive against overwhelming odds. Even in the absence of protest, he argues, the poor exercised plenty of agency: when a rickshaw puller talked back to a condescending customer, for example, or when a destitute family went cherry-blossom viewing or a worker spent his meager wage on grooming. Huffman, who grew up in a poor rural household in the United States, speaks from experience when he states: "If agency meant making 'free' choices within the limits of the structures that unfolded us, those who peopled my world were agents. Knowing that would make me forever skeptical of people who question the selfhood and agency of poor people anywhere" (p. 23). The book focuses on the second half of the Meiji era, the time between the 1880s and the mid-1910s. This was a distinct period in the history of Japanese poverty. As the country began to industrialize, enormous numbers of rural migrants streamed into the cities, boosting Tokyo's population from 1.4 million in 1888 to 2.3 million in 1903 (p. 1). These people toiled and lived under miserable conditions, with no labor movement or public welfare to mitigate their plight; even private charity was woefully underdeveloped. It was during these decades that journalists began to explore what they called the "caverns of the poor" (hinmingutsu) and published quasi-ethnographic slum reportages that both horrified and fascinated readers and spurred government officials into action. Huffman, too, limits his inquiry to the slums, particularly those of Tokyo and to a lesser extent of Osaka, Kobe, and other Japanese cities. He justifies this choice with the fact that the poor, who had formerly lived all over the city, were becoming increasingly concentrated in certain neighborhoods. This was partly because urban planning forced [End Page 432] them out of the central areas and partly because factories tended to spring up in certain wards, prompting workers to take up residence nearby. Urban poverty, of course, was a particular kind of poverty, and the author highlights its distinctiveness by offering two contrasts, both from the latter half of the Meiji period: one very general chapter on the rural poor in Japan with an emphasis on mountain and fishing villages, and the final chapter on Japanese migrant laborers in Hawai'i. These chapters help the author make important points about the difference between poor life in the countryside and in the cities. The urban poor, he argues, were more keenly aware of their poverty. They had fewer social ties and traditions to fall back on but could practice a greater variety of occupations and were less at the mercy of natural forces. For many migrants from the countryside, he suspects, the urban slums must have felt nearly as alien as Hawai'i's sugar plantations, where workers experienced racial discrimination along with back-breaking labor conditions. Huffman regards the poor with empathy, not with pity. He is interested in how they experienced their poverty and provides a richly textured portrait of life in the slums. After introducing the slum setting in the first chapter, he offers two chapters on work, one on home life, one on the endurance of hardships, and a chapter on "embracing life," which encompasses both activism and recreation. The book strives for some of the density of ethnographies of the modern urban poor such as Edward Fowler's...
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Jun 30, 2020
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