ABSTRACT
The story of modern homelessness in Japan begins with the state’s policy toward families. The Meiji government adopted the koseki, the family registration system, as a strategy to nationalize the population within its boundaries (see also Krogness, this volume). In the koseki system, every individual is defined as a member of an ie family, headed by the family leader. In the ie system, a family is deemed to exist at a certain place, and by being registered at the place and in the family, family members become national citizens. Through this, the koseki system provided a standard for exclusion. Urban populations without a permanent address, family, or permanent work have been labeled “bad” citizens and excluded from the civilized nation-state and society. After World War Two, the welfare system changed from a system designed to prevent poverty into a system to support all residents, thereby standardizing the settled family which contributes to an organized settled society. Thus, in spite of the advance of the state welfare system, these programs maintained standards that assumed all citizens would exist within families and therefore excluded non-ideal citizens who didn’t. In order to illuminate both the structural and personal links between homelessness and families, this chapter examines experiences of homelessness in Tokyo in the modern era to represent how homelessness is the result of the social and systematic exclusion of fluid and non-family peoples. Further this chapter describes the current phenomena such as street homeless since the 1990s, “rest box” users, and “net café refugees,” in relation to such social and systematic exclusion.
