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The problem of poverty is hidden in Japan, which is considered a rich country. However, as mentioned in the Beijing Platform for Action, poverty has been increasing not only in developing countries but also in economically advanced countries.
With the recent economic recession, low-paid and unstable employment as well as the burden of social security have been increasing. Women who are excluded from the main stream of the economy are suffering from poverty.
These women include solo mothers, elderly women, homeless women and migrant women, but it is very disappointing that the government's paper refers only to solo mothers.
At the Querun Summit the Japanese government promised merely to cancel a small portion of the debt of developing countries, while the monetary system has been under going a process of internationalization. The Japanese government should contribute more to relieve women in developing countries from the burden of debt.
There is a social security system in Japan, but the system does not work well for women and only a limited number of women are able to receive its benefits. Because of this, the system instead tends to create further poverty and discrimination against women. Women receive only half the amount of the employee pension of men, because the amount is based on wages and term of payment of premium. Women's wages are very low, and the systems of wages, taxes, pensions and social security are all based on a family that has a husband as a breadwinner and a wife as a dependent. If a woman gets divorced, she has to face poverty.
The social security system provides two kinds of services. One is public assistance. Even though this is based on the principle of giving support to anyone who needs it, this principle is not followed. There are many obstacles, such as a means test, a test of work eligibility, and an investigation into support responsibility, before people can receive the service. The feeling of stigmatization toward recipients is so strong that the application rate is under one third of people who are eligible to receive the service. (There was an incident in which a solo mother and her child died of starvation in Tokyo in 1996.) Undocumented foreign residents have no right to ask for assistance.
The other kind of service provides accommodation for women. Women can stay at facilities which are run under the Child Welfare Law, the Anti-Prostitution Law, are the Daily Life Security Law, or at Women's Advice Centers. However, the number of facilities is very limited, and some are reluctant to accept foreigners.
Concerning residential rights, the process of renting a room is very complex. Solo mothers, the aged, foreigners, the disabled and recipients of public assistance are refused more often than others.
In the field of work, after the burst of the economic bubble, wage systems started collapsing because companies had to survive the competition that came with the globalization of the economy. Companies prefer part-time to full-time workers, and part-time to dispatched and temporary workers, as seen in the case of part-time stewardesses. Women are forced to take these insecure, low-paid jobs. More women are forced to work longer hours or do two or more jobs. Chances to get public job training are decreasing, because public higher job training schools accept fewer students. Dismissals of married men, especially among the middle-aged, have a strong affect on their wives.
The number of families headed by solo mothers (solo mothers with children under 20 years old) is about 789,000. The number of divorces has been incre asing recently. The average income of these families is about 2.15 million yen (1993), only one third of that of general families. About 87% of solo mothers have jobs, but only 50% have full time jobs, while 30% are part-timers. Only 15% of the fathers pay for the cost of bringing up children. Solo mothers do not get a sufficient share of property in the case of divorce and a very low percentage of them own their own homes.
Because of the recent downturn in the economy, many solo mothers, who are in a weak position in the labor market, are forced to face sudden dismissal, bankruptcy, a change in the type of contract, bullying, and sexual harassment. One solo mother pays 80,000 yen out of her monthly income of 150,000 yen, to rent a small private room. Her family has to survive on the remaining 70,000 yen, paying all other expenses out of this.
In Japan, families headed by solo mothers caused by the death of fathers can receive a survivor's pension and others can receive a child-rearing allowance. The amount of the former is twice as much as that of the latter.
In 1998, as part of a governmental economic restructuring policy, the upper limit of the annual income permitted to get the benefit of the child-rearing allowance was lowered from 4.07 million yen to 3 million yen and as a result, about 74,000 mothers lost the benefit. At the same time, local government bodies carried out the same kind of policies, such as lowering the annual income limit for free medical services for solo mothers' families. If children need constant medical care such as for asthma, solo mothers face even more difficulties.
The Japanese government has partly amended its discriminatory treatment of the child-rearing allowance for unmarried mothers. This is the government's only positive move. We demand that the government lowers the upper limit of the income permitted for solo mothers to receive the allowance, and takes more positive initiatives to help solo mothers to find jobs.
Elderly women are more likely to suffer from poverty in society. According to one survey, half of the elderly in the care of family members have been abused by their care-givers, mostly by their daughters-in-law, called 'yome' in Japanese.
Elderly women living alone have different problems. A survey by the Ministry of Health and Welfare showed that more than 80% of people aged 65 or older who live alone are women. There is a clear trend for elderly women to suffer from economic problems. Reasons include the relatively low pensions, fewer opportunities for employment, and difficulty in renting rooms .
Also, 70% of residents of special nursing homes for the aged are women. Among them, unmarried elderly women get the benefit of public assistance for those without income, because their pensions are insufficient to live on.
Women who are engaged in agricultural and fishery work are also working women. They are eligible for the national pension but their work is unpaid, since the women are considered only family members, not workers. There is a special pension system for farmers, but only 5% of female farmers join it. Moreover, to join this pension system, women have to have a kind of contract with their husband as their employer. This means there is no way for women to join the pension without their husbands' consent.
The minimum standards of disabled women's lives are guaranteed by the pension system for the disabled and assistance under the Daily Life Security Law. But recently the issue of disabled who do not have the right to get the pension has received attention. Since the revision of the National Pension System in 1986, disabled women cannot receive a child-rearing allowance as guardians as well as the pension.
Disabled solo mother's families are forced to face poverty because of this. In the case of a family in which the father is disabled, the family is considered a solo parent family. The family can get both the pension for the disabled father and child rearing allowance. We ask the government to change this discriminatory law.
Women from Buraku communities have been deprived of opportunities for employment. There are notorious incidents such as the 'List of Locations of Buraku Communities', discriminatory research into birthplaces, which was revealed in Osaka in 1998. As a result, more women from Buraku Communities suffer from poverty. This also leads to fewer opportunities for education.
According to research done by the Prime Minister's Office in 1993, the number of families headed by the aged, solo mothers and solo fathers in Buraku Communities is twice that of other areas, revealing the fact that families in Buraku Communities have more problems.
Concerning families headed by solo mothers in Buraku Communities, the divorce rate is high, the education level of mothers is generally low, and income is low. They also have some health problems and the percentage that join the pension system is low, while the number of recipients of public assistance is high. These facts were revealed by research by Buraku Liberation League Osaka-fu in 1993. Discrimination and poverty are deeply related.
In Japan, we have seen more homeless women who sleep outdoors during the last four or five years. In February 1998, there were 53 homeless women (compared to 3,128 men) but the next year, there were 104 women (4,468 men). Most homeless women ranged from 40 to 80 years old. They started sleeping outdoors for various reasons. Because of their age, many had lost their jobs, as well as a place to stay, which had been provided by their employers. Some women are forced to sleep outdoors because their husbands have lost their jobs. There are also women who cannot stay at home because they do not get along with other family members. There are women who have escaped from domestic violence by their husbands or from debt to consumer credit businesses. In the Sanya area, some women who used to be prostitutes in the nearby red light area called Yoshiwara started sleeping outdoors when they get old. In the past, some were taken to World War II as 'comfort women' and some who are in their 60s, 70s or even older are still working as prostitutes. Generally speaking, the educational level of homeless women is not high. Sometimes they are mentally retarded,or have psychiatric problems.
The issue of women sleeping outdoors has not received much attention until recently. There are reasons for this. It was easier for women, even at an older age, to find jobs with accommodation, such as domestic helpers, and social security services are more protective of women than of men.
Women find sleeping outdoors much more difficult than men do. Younger women may be absorbed into sex industries before they start sleeping outdoors. Homeless women feel more pressure than men in the same situation, because they suffer from sexual harassment by people walking the streets and also by other homeless people. To escape from this pressure, some women start having sexual relations with men who can protect them, while some wear thick clothes, trying not to show their bodies or themselves in public. Discussion on the issue of homeless men has just started on a national level, but that about women has not yet started.
In Japan, indigenous Ainu women have no rights as indigenous people. Their poverty has been created by discrimination and a history of discriminatory assimilation policies over the past several hundred years. Assimilation policies after the Meiji Era have taught Japanese people to discriminate against Ainu, and Ainu to lose their identity as a nation. Poverty has worsened the situation created by the discrimination and violence that always exists in Ainu women's daily lives. Ainu women have been the victims of violence from both Japanese and Ainu men.
Since the literacy level of Ainu women aged 50 or older is relatively low, they are forced to take low-paid jobs. The literacy level of Ainu children continues to be low and poverty is reproduced again and again.
According to research done by Hokkaido Prefecture in 1986, 6.08% of Ainu people in Hokkaido received public assistance. Few students went to high school, and only one third of the students went on to university level. Many Ainu people go to big cities like Tokyo to get jobs. Ainu people need new policies so that poverty and discrimination do not recur in the next generation.
Foreigners resident in Japan refers to those who came to Japan for historical reasons such as colonization, and who have the right of permanent residence in Japan. Until 1982, these people had no right to join the national pension system because of their nationality. (There is no such condition for employee pensions.) Even after this condition was removed, the government did not take any initiative and many foreign women residents who are elderly, disabled, or solo mothers have been left without any right to get a pension. North Koreans who completed their national high school in Japan were not given permission to take the entrance examinations for Japanese universities, though some have been allowed to do so for the first time in 1999. The situation is also the same for other foreigners.
Foreigners resident in Japan face hardships in getting jobs even though the nationality condition was partly removed from restriction of examination for civil servants. Many foreign women residents are left outside the social security system in Japan because of this social discrimination, and fall easily into poverty.
A large number of foreign migrants without a permanent visa are also working in Japan. Statistics from the Ministry of Justice show that more than 270,000 migrant workers were working in Japan without a proper visa, or overstaying, at the end of 1998.
In fact, Japan has added more than 100,000 migrant women to its sex industries annually since the latter half of the 1980s. Besides these women, a small number of women migrants are working with a special activity visa as domestic workers, while some are working in the food industry, or making beds. Most of these women have no other choice than to work for very low wages.Their living conditions are extremely poor.
In many cases they live together as a group, in very small apartments. They often become victims of violence or unpaid wages. Various kinds of human rights violations and poverty overlap to worsen women's situation.
According to statistics at the end of 1997, about 275,000 foreign spouses of Japanese men have alien registration. Since their visa status is based on their relationship with their husbands, their position is isolated and very weak. In some cases, women have to endure difficult situations such as a husband's violence or being abandoned. In other cases, women have to bear being sexually exploited by a husband who is a pimp. They are afraid of losing their visa status, and so are unable to get divorced.
There are many cases in which after a woman gives birth to the baby of a Japanese men outside wedlock , the man stops contacting her, leaving the mother and the child in poverty. In cases when a Japanese man does not admit paternity of the child before its birth, and neither the mother nor the child possess a proper visa , they are excluded from human rights security mechanisms such as education, medical care, and social welfare, and left in isolated poverty.
Migrant women of Japanese descent mainly came from South America together with their families under a long-term resident visa status in the 1990s. They work in factories run by subcontractors in fields such as electricity and car manufacturing, and have been directly attacked by the tide of dismissal in the economic recession.
As a whole, migrant women are exposed to human rights violations, left in poverty and excluded from human rights security mechanisms. We strongly recommend that foreign entertainers and domestic workers should be included under the protection of the Labor Standard Law, public aid to non-government shelters should be increased, a multi-language counseling service should be set up, and a social welfare (insurance) system for all, regardless of visa status should be established.
Sixty percent of the people who died in the Great Hanshin-Awaji Earthquake were women and 53% of the dead were 65 or older. The percentage of victims among families receiving public assistance was five times as high as those not receiving it. This shows that the elderly and other vulnerable people had been living in inferior accommodation, such as old unrepaired apartments in crowded areas. As a result, they died of suffocation under the collapsed buildings or could not escape from the narrow streets.
After the earthquake, the local economy faced problems and women were dismissed from big department stores and supermarkets. Most part-time working women lost their jobs before men did.
Many elderly women are taking shelter in temporary accommodation. There are many calls from elderly women living alone to ask for help, because their monthly income is only from 30,000 to 50,000 yen from their pensions.
Communities were lost due to the earthquake and people were forced to live alone in temporary accommodation. Communities cannot return to the same situation as before even if people manage to go back there. Elderly people, especially women, remain poor and lonely.
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TOC(ja) | Souron | A | B | C | D | E | F | G | H | I | J | K | L | IkenTeishutu |
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