Results of a periodic survey of the Ministry of Social Welfare on minors living in families with incomes below half of the median income. The situation is more similar to that of Brazil or South Africa than to that of the United States or the other G7 countries.
Tokyo ( / Agencies) – In Japan, almost half of single-parent families – families in which children grow up with only one parent – live in poverty. This has been the result of a survey carried out by the Japanese Ministry of Welfare on the living conditions of the country’s inhabitants in 2021 published by the Asahi Shimbun newspaper.
This is a high figure, and although it registers a drop of 3.8% compared to 2018, when 44.5% of these households were in a situation of poverty, it is still very far from the 31.9% of the average of the Member States of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development. In this ranking, Japan is ranked, out of 43 countries, as the eighth with the highest number of single-parent families in poverty. To broaden the perspective and understand the situation, Brazil has the highest poverty rate for these families, with 54.8%, followed by South Africa, with 49.8%.
“Rising prices are endangering the lives of parents and children,” says Yumiko Watanabe, director of the Tokyo-based nonprofit Kids’ Door, which provides free education to primary and secondary school children. with the support of social services. Another Japanese third sector organization, NPO, conducted an internet survey among the families in poverty it assists. The result is that 90% of the households contacted were single-parent, made up of a single mother with one or more dependent children. Of all those interviewed, 60% said that their expected income in 2023 will be around 2 million yen (about 13,000 euros) and 40% normally spend 110 yen (0.64 euros) on a meal, or even less, per person. .
In the free response section of the online survey, one respondent wrote: “We had no choice but to lower the quality of our food. This is why my son is now overweight based on a health check at school.” Others wrote: “Some days we were so hungry that we drank a lot of water just to fill our stomachs”, and also: “I depend on school lunches to feed my son and I manage as I can”.
However, looking at the medium-term data, it should be noted that the child poverty rate in Japan has been continuously declining since 2015. The country’s total poverty level was 15.4% in the 2021 survey, 0. 3 points less than in 2018, although families with children represent only 18.3% of all households. Also counting the one-persons, it is the lowest number ever recorded in Japan.
The Kishida government attributed the steady improvement to economic support measures introduced during the Covid-19 pandemic, along with an overall rise in income in Japan helped by more women entering the job market.
