In Japan’s livelihood security system since the latter half of the 1990s, young people and women have faced exclusion, while middle-aged and older male breadwinners continued to be relatively secure. What the Japanese system had ‘accomplished’ by the early years of the new millennium was to turn Japan into one of the worst performers among OECD countries in terms of both its relative poverty rate and income disparity. Worse still, male breadwinners, although privileged by the system, have not remained unaffected by exclusion either. Even while the annual toll of traffic accident deaths averages about 5,000 in Japan, the number of suicides has exceeded 30,000 for the 12th straight year since 1998, with males in their forties and fifties accounting for 10,000 of the total. Needless to say, not only middle-aged or older men commit suicide in Japan. Japan has the world’s second highest suicide rate for women and the seventh highest for men. By contrast, Japan’s birth rate is among the world’s lowest, second only to the Republic of Korea.