Japan's working poor hit hard

Just beneath the nation's luxurious exterior, a new population barely makes ends meet

By Shino Yuasa ASSOCIATED PRESS | Friday, October 31, 2008

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TOKYO — In one of the world's wealthiest nations, Junpei Murasawa is a poor man. He skips meals to make ends meet. A bachelor, he lives in a tiny apartment in Tokyo, sharing a kitchen, toilet and shower with nine neighbors. He doesn't have health insurance because he can't afford the premiums.

The 29-year-old laborer is one of a burgeoning class in Japan — the working poor. The number of Japanese earning less than $19,610 a year surged 40 percent from 2002 to 2006, the latest data available, the government says. They now number more than 10 million.

In a country that boasts the world's longest-living population, where young women with Louis Vuitton bags crowd the sidewalks, Mr. Murasawa's is a voice of hopelessness and despair — a voice increasingly heard in Japan.

"Everyday I live in deep anxiety," said the soft-spoken temporary worker, currently making $882 a month by bagging purchases at a home improvement center. "When I think about my future, I get sleepless at night."

The plight of such workers is likely to worsen as the current global financial crisis ripples through the Japanese economy. At the bottom of the economic food chain, Mr. Murasawa and his cohorts will be the first to suffer.

The growth of the working poor — not seen in such numbers since Japan surged to wealth in the 1980s — has been a shock to a country that once prided itself on being a bastion of economic equality.

"It is unprecedented to see such a widening income gap in Japan," said Yoshio Sasajima, economist at Meiji Gakuin University in Tokyo. "Our society is definitely becoming a class society."

The seeds of change now wrenching Japanese society were planted in the burst of the so-called "bubble economy" in the early 1990s.

As the Tokyo stock market tumbled, evaporating vast stores of wealth, corporations restructured by laying off workers. In the 2000s, a round of free-market reforms widened the disparity between haves and have-nots.

A key to the growth of the working poor has been the explosion in temporary employment agencies, which allow corporations to take on labor without having to pay benefits - and then unload workers at will.

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