I do not trust any stats that come out of Japan in terms of homelessness. If there’s a statistic that’s embarrassing for Japanese society, you know damn well they’re gonna try to cover it up with technicalities.
In Japan, the legal definition for someone who is homeless is: “those who use city parks, riverbanks, roads, train
stations and other facilities as their place of stay in order to live their daily lives.”
So that doesn’t include living in your car, living in insecure housing, living in shelters, or living in internet cafés, of which in 2020 there were about 15,000 ‘net café refugees’ in Tokyo alone.
Sooo yeah, Japan can claim to officially have a super low homeless population, because they’ve narrowed the definition so much that you have to literally be sleeping on the street for it to count.
I’ve lived in three different major Japanese cities and see fewer people sleeping rough in a year than I can see in an hour in either Europe or the US.
Sleeping Rough != Homeless though. Granted, almost everyone who sleeps rough is homeless, but not every homeless sleeps rough. Japan only counts people sleeping rough as homeless though.
Also there’s the element of being seen sleeping rough. There are plenty of people sleeping rough out there, but they don’t want to be seen that way so they keep to themselves and stay away from the general public, getting across the idea that there aren’t many of them.
They also flub their murder rates. It’s considered unclean to handle dead bodies, so autopsies aren’t common and anything that could be ruled a suicide, is.
I do not trust any stats that come out of Japan in terms of homelessness. If there’s a statistic that’s embarrassing for Japanese society, you know damn well they’re gonna try to cover it up with technicalities.
In Japan, the legal definition for someone who is homeless is: “those who use city parks, riverbanks, roads, train stations and other facilities as their place of stay in order to live their daily lives.”
So that doesn’t include living in your car, living in insecure housing, living in shelters, or living in internet cafés, of which in 2020 there were about 15,000 ‘net café refugees’ in Tokyo alone.
Sooo yeah, Japan can claim to officially have a super low homeless population, because they’ve narrowed the definition so much that you have to literally be sleeping on the street for it to count.
yeah they also fail to acknowledge the suicide rate or the amount of overtime or purchasing power of avg wages.
I’m not making any statements on any countries other than japan. but I’ll add a message to american weebs: STOP FETISHIZING JAPAN
I’ve lived in three different major Japanese cities and see fewer people sleeping rough in a year than I can see in an hour in either Europe or the US.
Sleeping Rough != Homeless though. Granted, almost everyone who sleeps rough is homeless, but not every homeless sleeps rough. Japan only counts people sleeping rough as homeless though.
Also there’s the element of being seen sleeping rough. There are plenty of people sleeping rough out there, but they don’t want to be seen that way so they keep to themselves and stay away from the general public, getting across the idea that there aren’t many of them.
They also flub their murder rates. It’s considered unclean to handle dead bodies, so autopsies aren’t common and anything that could be ruled a suicide, is.
They cover it with Hideo Kojima