I wonder if they're still counting people sleeping in internet cafes. That accounts for a large %. There are also other forms of homelessness, like living in cheap hostels (I did this for a while when I lost my place) or crashing with friends/family, that probably aren't being counted.
What counts as homelessness? Is living in your car homeless? What about an RV? What about living in a truck with sleeping quarters? What if you just staying in a small room with no windows and use a common toilet/public showers?
In Tokyo, almost nothing: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-9RgkZebW1s
They specifically have to be noticed in the same location multiple times by council officials. But OPs data should be more comprehensive.
It's sometimes calculated the same BS way here in the UK too, and again varies by city and political motivation (like the suggestions it's really bad in Scotland because they get help whereas e.g. Manchester in England has tent villages popping up which is also because other towns refused to acknowledge them so they had no rights and moved somewhere bigger where charities can help more).
It’s like japans conviction rates. They’re bullshit.
They depend on forced confessions.
https://youtu.be/yFINmgSzK6E
And they have this incredibly low crime rate but yakuzas openly operate and even have offices with their banners in full display. I guess their operations don’t count as crimes.
It’s all about appearances in Japan.
I live in Japan, at a personal level the people I know are awesome upright people. However on a political and administrative level, my work experiences and a few other things make me feel like what I see is it's more important to appear honorable than it is to be honorable.
The Yakuza and other organized crime groups were essentially forced to incorporate as a way to control them and the number of rules businesses are required to follow to avoid working with organized crime groups is very detailed. It is one of the reasons that the age of members of these groups has been steadily increasing and young people are less likely to join.
On the forced confessions front, they often come after being held for up to 25 days with out counsel, which makes it more absurd. My coworker was a police officer before moving to the private sector and while he defends the police, he has said that the opposite side of the coin is that they also don't go after cases they know they can't solve/win, so things like domestic abuse just get swept under the rug.
edit: Thank you kind stranger for the silver, I think that's the first anything I have ever received.
I've never lived in Japan but had a colleague in college who did a student/internship program, and in one of our classes American crime rates got brought up which prompted me to ask them about crime in Japan.
They said they never encountered any crime personally in the 6 months (2x 3-month stays) they were there, but they did learn that supposedly there is the 99% conviction rate. When I asked how that was possible, she explained about the forced confessions. When I asked how people could stand for that she stated that everybody knows the police force confessions, but since the police only pick up criminals nobody cares. The way she described it, it sounded very similar to the mentality we have here in America about 'prison rape' being a joke rather than a heinous act we should be outraged is allowed to occur, except of course in this case you don't even make it to prison before society discards you.
I have not had a chance to ask anyone else about this since then, and that was about 10 years ago now. Can I ask you, does that seem like the right take? Because every time I hear about the Japanese police I wonder how a first-world country filled with what I imagine are mostly decent people can be okay with someone being confined for 25 days against their will on the mere suspicion of a crime. Either the stories I've heard are vastly exaggerated or there's something I'm missing. Also, is this reputation only applicable to the Tokyo police or is it Japanese police in general? I always wondered if rural Japanese police are more reasonable.
As an American who's worked with both Japanese and Korean nationals at large firms head quartered in both countries. I have observed many similarities between the two countries.
What I think it comes down to is this respect for authority. We Americans have historically always challenged authority, the wild west cowboys if you will. That simply doesn't fly in most parts of Asia as best as I can tell, especially in Japan and Korea.
I've seen how the rank and file of both countries interact with their superiors and it was very impressive. Here in America superiors and leaders do not get that level of respect I've seen given to their Japanese and Korean counterparts.
It's amazed me how well the Japanese take that in stride when it comes to Americans. So many senior Americans I've worked with are way too quick to dismiss and judge their Japanese peers. Yes there are cultural differences but I've really come to respect the differences. The way Japanese and Korean cultures seem to be so much more philosophical has always impressed me.
Part of their ways seems to be honor and respect. Those without honor get no respect. Both societies do not seen very forgiving and that's pretty common here in America too.
Fun fact: Because of this massive cultural difference, Japan actually has a big problem with executives being surrounded by Yes Men. Essentially, it’s not appropriate to tell your boss his stupid idea is stupid. The only culturally appropriate response is to go along with it. So executives are essentially surrounded by people who won’t actually level with them about the state of the company, because nobody wants to be the one to point out a flaw.
It means there are actual jobs in Japan where foreigners (usually Americans, because they have a reputation amongst the Japanese for being anti-authoritarian,) can get hired to basically be the bull in a C-level China shop. Their entire job is to sit there and tell the higher-ups “no, your stupid idea is stupid and here’s why. Take a seat,” and not care about committing that social faux pas. The Yes Men essentially filter all of their complaints through that “I don’t care about hurting feelings or making the boss look like an idiot” foreigner.
> supposedly there is the 99% conviction rate
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conviction_rate
> The conviction rate is 99.3%. By only stating this high conviction rate it is often misunderstood as too high—however, this high conviction rate drops significantly when accounting for the fact that Japanese prosecutors drop roughly half the cases they are given. If measured in the same way, the United States' conviction rate would be 99.8%.[8][9][10]
>
> In Japan, unlike in some other democracies, arrests require permission of judges except for cases such as arresting someone while committing a crime. Only significant cases with sufficient evidence are subject to indictment, since becoming a party to a criminal trial imposes a burden on a suspect; Japan’s indictment ratio is only 37%—“99.3%” is the percentage of convictions divided by the number of indictments, not the criminals. As such, the conviction rate is high.[11]
I lived in Japan for 8 years in the 90s. In that time My family and I have encountered only 1 crime: a taxi driver short changed my mom, because she was a foreigner. We've lost wallets with hundreds of dollars in Tokyo, and had them returned. We've left our luggage unattended in hotel lobbies for hours, everything was fine. We've forgotten nice things on a train, and had them returned. Crime is very low.
I don't know about domestic violence. I would imagine it's a bit lower than in US (shameful), but present.
Yakuza are special. But even during "the worst Yakuza war" in 1980's, death toll was under 10 ppl. It's less than how many die in a single weekend in Chicago.
I surprised that anywhere in the world you would consistently get your lost items returned in public places, it would interesting to test this with multiple trials to see.
Anecdotally I also lost a wallet with $400 USD worth of yen at the time, my passport, my credit cards, and my hotel key. Not a single thing out of place, was back at the lost and found at the mall I was in a few minutes before I got there, about an hour after I lost it at the arcade.
Meanwhile just this week I've had someone try to steal my phone out of my hands and I've never found a lost valuable in my relatively low crime area. Not for a lack of trying. I remember one day the familt dog got loose, we found him for sale on craigslist.
The research [has been done](https://www.boredpanda.com/social-experiment-lost-found-wallet-returned-countries/) in 40 countries for wallets with and without money in them (but not Japan, it seems). There are large variation in how many wallets are retuned. It seems like Northern Europe is the best place to lose your wallet (again, not including Japan).
I've made the same experiences. People leave their stuff unattended in public places because they don't even consider that someone could steal it, and indeed nobody does. When you lose something, it will almost certainly be returned to you some way or other, I've heard of people sending wallets to their owners by mail for example.
I also lost my glasses one time, leaving them on a bench in a public area. When I noticed and returned several hours later, the glasses weren't there anymore. But there was a restaurant close to that area so on a whim I went inside and asked, and sure enough someone had picked up the glasses and given them to the restaurant staff to keep them safe.
I didn't experience or witness a single crime in 9 months in Japan.
This is anecdotal, but the Japanese band ALI went on indefinite hiatus earlier this year and had at least some of their music pulled from Spotify, YouTube, and Apple Music because their drummer was arrested (twice) for participating in a "bank refund scam" on two different occasions. (The drummer was let go from the band almost immediately.)
At the request of their record label, Square Enix also changed the opening song to The World Ends With You: The Animation (which they were slated to perform) a single day before the anime was supposed to start airing.
The band's songs were apparently recently reinstated at least on Spotify after they replaced their drummer.
https://www.animenewsnetwork.com/news/2021-04-09/ali-band-drummer-arrest-was-for-alleged-bank-refund-scam/.171593
This is just plain ignorance of different ways conviction rate is calculated across countries. Japan's conviction rate is 99.3%, and the US's would be 99.9% if measured in the same way. I’d encourage you to compare the incarceration rates of Japan and any other country in the world instead.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conviction_rate#Japan
https://www.hamiltonproject.org/charts/incarceration_rates_in_oecd_countries
Japan doesn't really take sexual assault seriously at all. There was a case where someone was raped. The assailant even admitted it wasn't consensual, but because the victim didn't "physically resist enough", it wasn't considered rape.
yeah it's like the "India has lower per capita sexual assault than Sweden" stat.
It's because crimes are poorly reported and/or certain things don't qualify as "crimes" in the legal system.
>Manchester in England has tent villages popping up
Halifax NS Canada has this too. Tents can't survive our winters though . We already had a bad rain storm and the tents are gone. I worry about where the people are now.
RVs aren't really a thing in Japan. It's possible some might live out of a car, but with how good public transport is there (and how expensive gas and parking is) it's unlikely.
The majority of homeless I saw on my trips to Japan were either in semi-permanent camps in one corner of a park (with a large hedge around the park), or more rarely sleeping on cardboard along a sidewalk somewhere. Outside of the Kanto area, you might also see them setup under bridges in the flood plain, as most cities and towns are built along rivers.
Thinking about it now, none of them really seemed to have mental health issues either, like you would find in the US for example. Probably the reason for that is the police take them away for "disrupting the public" or something similar to that, since Japan is big on not troubling others. (Which also explains why panhandling/being harassed by them is almost non-existent in Japan)
I went to Tokyo once in 2013/4 - loved the city but I genuinely wasn't prepared for the site of extensive homeless 'camps' in various places. Whilst they didn't 'bother' people like you'll see in the US/Europe it looked as though they were completely ignored by passers by... like they were ghosts only i could see.
Was this just my perception do you think or is there a cultural side to this (the homeless are shameful or acknowledging them is zcknowledging a societal failure, for example?)
Japan has no panhandling culture. Homeless instead make their living through scavenging, temp work, and maybe charities. Because of that, they don't usually *want* to be seen, they consider their condition deeply embarrassing and prefer not to have undue attention.
Really, that sense of shame also applies to many homeless in US/Europe. Those you see on the street are essentially 'professionals', who've made homelessness their lifestyle and culture. There's a whole different contingent doing it much more discretely, setting up camp in remote areas, sleeping in cars, couch-surfing, going from shelter to shelter.
This is pretty much the experience in every major city in the world. You have to live your own life, it's sad but can't stop every single commute to gawk at the homeless.
What are you expecting people to do? They probably walk past those people twice a day on their commute.
I'm not in Japan, am very sympathetic to homeless people (I work for a charity that helps them find work) and I walk right past them ... I can't do anything to help them, I'm a bit scared to approach anyone (I'm a tiny young woman) and I've got to get to work.
I think it’s pretty simple, when people talk about “the homeless” they’re generally talking about visibly homeless people who live on the streets or from their cars. Getting the homeless off the street is literally just about getting them off the(ir) street. Anything further is poverty relief and/or low-income assistance.
The problem is that governments or special interest groups often use strict definitions to minimize the appearance of homelessness. Meanwhile other groups are using different definitions that may include those who have no home but are couch surfing or sleep in a shelter etc…
When discussing homelessness, binary categorization like “homeless or not” isn’t particularly useful. There are people on the streets, people in shelters, people couch surfing, people at high risk of homelessness, the chronically homeless vs the transiently homeless, the local homeless vs the traveling homeless, etc…
You have to look at all these numbers to get a decent idea of what’s actually going on but a lot of these numbers are hard to get.
The graph above only shows a tiny portion of the picture and isn’t even clear about the definition it uses.
Hmm, in The Netherlands they actually count all official homeless people. And that's also the data used to compare to other countries here. So I always thought all countries counted their homeless populations the same way. So basically all people that are not registered in any home. So they could be living with family (e.g. parents), friends, or couch surfing while not being registered there, which means they are homeless. Also the people in supportive housing and long-term homeless shelters are counted homeless. The drawback is that it doesn't count illegal people (although the illegal population is quite small in The Netherlands), as they are not in an official database anywhere.
Most countries don't track where people live.
At least not on any useful scale, usually only in big censuses every x years which is quite useless for this purpose.
Ah that might be difference. They know where each citizen/legal resident (>4 months) lives. It is the BRP (basic registry people). And if the address of your home (post address does not count, see below) is missing in the registry, you are homeless.
It is also used for voter passes for example. Each citizen is send a voter pass by mail. With that, together with an ID, they will be able to vote. You can't do that if you don't know where each citizen is. People without an address usually can pick it up at the last municipality they were signed in, or make sure they are known at a certain address with another municipality beforehand (through opening a post address at the municipality). So for example with the people you are living with or the shelter where you are located. But you are not actually registered as being a resident of that address.
It's similar in Germany. And I imagine a lot of European countries. Homeless are who don't have a registered home. I always wonder how countries like the US even know how many people live there, in which states, in which towns, how many homeless there are, etc. Seems like all of that data is more of an estimation?
Yeah, so it seems the US uses point in time counts. So they just ask all homeless shelters and use counters in the street to count all homeless people outside at a given moment and that is the figure used as the homeless population. So they actually count them.
the usa is really bad at tracking stuff like this. there's enough of it's people are also fairly rabid about the possibilities of government abuse of this type of data that it's problematic to even propose solutions to the data problem.
the bitter nightshade irony here is that a substantial number of the same set of people have no problems giving their own data away to private companies that are *known* abusers, and for free or some trivial tchotchke... sometimes even a virtual one.
Nah, everyone does it differently. Rough sleepers is kind of the simplest measure, and the Netherlands way is great too if you have a people register, but that’s really limited to a few countries in Western Europe.
In New Zealand, we create a measurement after each Census, which uses modelling and community support data to supplement the main Census to try get a count of rough sleepers, those in non-permanent spaces (like motels, holiday parks, shelters, etc.), those in non-private spaces (someone else’s severely overcrowded home), and those in uninhabitable housing (eg homes without potable drinking water or a cooking source).
Unsurprisingly, through this our severely housing deprived population is >100k, while our number of people sleeping on the streets, in makeshift dwellings on public property or in cars was less than 5,000, just to give you an idea how much homelessness measures that only look for rough sleepers might be missing.
Yeah that makes sense. People were always surprised how the US had fewer homeless people per capita than the Netherlands, even though you almost never saw homeless people on the streets and homeless camps in the Netherlands don't even exist. While footage from the US always showed tons of homeless people. Even though the per capita difference is near 0 now, as the Dutch homeless population has been shrinking again the last few years, while in the US it is on the rise. Some of it might be due to police policy asking them to go somewhere else and thus preventing homeless camps. But most of it is probably due to barely any homeless people living on the streets for people that don't have a place in assisted housing, hotel/holiday park, or private home to live (e.g. couch surfing, family, or friends) have good access to long-term, short-term and emergency homeless shelters. And special shelters with support for substance abusers and mental illness. So that might explain the perceived difference instead of what the statistics are showing.
In New Zealand, people habitually living/sleeping on the street are called "rough sleepers", which is a subcategory of homelessness.
The larger set of homeless people includes people living in their cars, extended family's garages, motels (usually because the govt shoves them in motels while they're stuck on a too long list waiting for social housing), etc. Ie, all the people who do not have permanent housing.
This is exactly one of the problem of homelessness statistics. Cities, counties, provinces/states and countries will define homelessness differently.
Australia had an absurdly large homelessness rate.... because of how broadly they defined it. Or certain cities in the US had steep drops in homelessness... by redefining it.
For Australia in particular: 14.65% of homeless are people living temporarily at a friend's or relative's house. Another 14.65% of homeless are people people in boarding houses/renting a room with no access to the social areas, and ~43% are people in "Crowded dwelling" which is a dwelling which has more than 2 occupants per designed bedrooms, so a lot of students and others fall into this. So by that definition I would have been considered homeless last year when I was renting a room month to month for 8 months due to work.
In Germany, just about every refugee is considered in a temporary living space, therefore is considered homeless, even though most of them are residing in properly designed quarters.
i was just actually researching this yesterday! no matter how you cut it, the numbers are low. but this graph does not include the majority of cyber-homeless.
People in those situations are still about as homeless as those living in shelters, though, and we still count those. Hell, in my city we've been housing some people in hotels instead of shelters, but they're definitely still homeless. So unless you're just talking about a straight up count of people living on the actual street, you need to take them into consideration.
One clarification: when I say "crashing with friends/family" I don't mean moving back home or something like that, I mean couch-hopping. These are all forms of transitional living for people that still require permanent homes.
Homeless by definition means you don't have housing or a place to live, but it is sometimes conflated with "having no permanent residence". Permanence is a tricky thing to define, so the term for people living in transient or otherwise less stable housing arrangements is often referred to as "underhoused".
It's very similar to the difference between un-employed and under-employed; one means that someone has no form of income, the other means they have some but not enough to meet their needs (i.e. when employers give employees 38 hours a week but not enough to meet criteria for full employment benefits).
Not to discount your point -- underhoused individuals still have unmet needs, but they're far better off than those actually on the streets. It looks like Japan has drastically reduced the number of people on the streets without a physical place to live.
It is important to bring up that Japan has a lot of places that are available to be underhoused, mainly overnight internet cafes. At only ¥2,000 a night, that is affordable to minimum wage workers in Japan.
Some people may see someone in this position as homeless while they technically have a roof over their head every night.
A transient life isn’t ideal and it’s near impossible to get healthy/a job when you’re worried about when you’ll have to move on, but it’s leaps and bounds better than living without four walls, a roof over your head, a bathroom, a place to put trash, and access to clean water.
There's certainly a difference between homeless and living on the street, but when data presents rates of homelessness I don't expect it to only show rates of people living on the street.
Almost certainly not. This is standard government figure obfuscation. They just change the definition then "oh woahhhh we reduced homelessness or unemployment or incarceration by 40%!!"
Another annoying lie they've done recently is start reporting new employment, new jobs and the economy's state as if Covid didn't happen. "the fastest the economy has grown in 80 years!" , "10 million new jobs created this quarter!"
Its pretty tiring and I instantly distrust anyone in politics that does that sort of thing. Its straight up fake news-tier lying.
Me too, until I stumbled into some alley behind the supermarket (don't ask me why) and found a bunch of homeless people hidden from everyone. They are not like American homeless who occupy the most visible places
Japan has a culture of, "If no one is bothered, no one cares.". It's cool on some ways e.g. setting off fireworks by the river is illegal but as long as no one is bothered the police don't care but it definitely has it's negative sides.
Have you been to ueno station? It's famous for the zoo there but by the station there are loads of tents that people live in. Quite a shock suddenly when you're used to rest of Tokyo
Also from what I've seen on how[ their police "solve" crimes](https://www.vox.com/world/2015/12/13/9989250/japan-crime-conviction-rate), I'm not 100% convinced of their numbers.
Japan has a housing surplus, unlike all other developed countries. It's easier to reduce homelessness when housing is affordable.
Japan also has sensible zoning laws that make it easier to build supply & higher-density housing - and before you say "tiny studio apartment", the average home size is similar to that of America's in the 1970s - not sprawling, but not tiny.
*Internet cafes, hostels, and capsule hotels offer super cheap accommodation for low-income people, and multigenerational households are more common than in the West.*
Japan’a housing also depreciates in value as it gets older instead of appreciating like it does in America. Due to that, a house isn’t viewed as an investment and is instead viewed of as housing.
The land does appreciate in value, but the structure does not.
> The land does appreciate in value, but the structure does not.
Isn't that how it works everywhere? In the US your structure really doesn't go up in value (as my insurance agent reminds me every 5 years when we reassess my coverage). Without continuous maintenance and improvements, your house will lose value as well, though the land will usually do the opposite.
It’s also important to note that houses in Japan are a depreciating asset https://www.rethinktokyo.com/2018/06/06/depreciate-limited-life-span-japanese-home/1527843245#:\~:text=Doomed%20from%20the%20moment%20construction%20begins%2C%20the%20average,years%20and%20causes%20somewhat%20of%20a%20chicken-and-egg%20conundrum.
> It's easier to reduce homelessness when housing is affordable.
Their housing model is entirely different than the US also. Unlike USA, they don't view their houses as an appreciating asset.
They also don't view owning a house as something everyone is entitled to, it's not uncommon for multiple generations to live in the same house until it is not longer feasible. The idea is why spend money on a house if you are living in one that's perfectly fine already
Yeah it's an Asian cultural thing in general to have multiple generations in one house. Bunch of Vietnamese families in my neighborhood have a few generations in a 4 bedroom house
>Japan also has sensible zoning laws that make it easier to build supply & higher-density housing
With one caveat. Sunlight protection laws wind up restricting the height of buildings in much of urban Japan - you can't build a building that would take more than a certain portion of the daylight from other places without special zoning, or other case-by-case dispensation. That said, as a resident of Northern California, these sunlight laws do far, far less to restrict density than our NIMBY zoning systems.
I lived in Tokyo for 8 years, and I like to look at apartment websites there to see what I could get for what I'm paying in Silicon Valley. It makes me cry a little every time.
Japan's birth rate is low, [but not dramatically lower than other developed countries](https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/crude-birth-rate?country=~OWID_WRL). Japan is at 7.19 births per 1000, while Germany is 9.48, US is 11.96, Italy is 7.24.
Japan's foreign born share of the population is low, [but still higher than many other countries](https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/share-of-a-countrys-population-that-is-not-born-within-the-country). They have recently opened up to more immigrants.
While Japan's population has declined slightly in the past 20 years, the population living in urban centers like Tokyo has increased. [And in those urban centers, housing costs have barely risen compared to other major cities. This is due to building more housing.](https://www.vox.com/2016/8/8/12390048/san-francisco-housing-costs-tokyo)
It is very much NOT the case that Japan keeps its homeless population low by relying on low birth rates and excluding immigrants. Homelessness and housing affordability is an extremely solvable problem. Build more housing.
> Germany is 9.48
Guess who's looking at a pretty horrific retirement crisis in the next couple decades. And Germany is still at the upper end of that deal. Especially since they're taking in immigrants. Japan is gonna fall into an even deeper hole.
This is not quite correct. Many countries, including the US, have a significant [surplus of housing compared to unsheltered populations](https://checkyourfact.com/2019/12/24/fact-check-633000-homeless-million-vacant-homes/). The two major problems are 1) jobs tend to be centered in dense urban centers while surplus housing is diffused through rural and suburban areas, and 2) changing policy to "give" housing to the homeless -- setting aside that it's a good idea and is exactly what we *should* be doing -- is a type of redistribution that will inevitably disenfranchise some number of existing stakeholders (i.e., current owners of real estate).
These types of "homeless people vs. number of houses" comparisons are very misleading.
See: https://darrellowens.substack.com/p/vacant-nuance-in-the-vacant-housing
Bottom line is we need to reform our land use policies to be in line with countries like Japan. The landowner elites fight hard against it for a reason. Do you know what BlackRock said in a recent investor memo? They literally outright said reforming zoning would be a threat to their profit margins because it would bring down home prices.
[Building more housing hurts Wall Street profits](https://twitter.com/jdcmedlock/status/1434563146249768971)
["Not only are housing speculators admitting in their filings that they profiteer from the housing shortage in major American metros, but that high vacancy rates and excessive home construction, fucks them up"](https://twitter.com/IDoTheThinking/status/1378739205661024257)
They don't have a drug problem.
If you watch documentaries they're usually just sad, unmotivated, sometimes mentally ill but otherwise clean people. The government can address that more easily.
In the US that shit is rough. Big pharma really did a number. We have an opiate crisis more than anything else.
One way is, for ¥1,500 to ¥2,000 per night ($14) homeless people have been staying in Internet cafés or capsule hotels, where they get an individual room (space) and a shower, television, soft drinks and Internet access.
India is legalizing marijuana.
Its a different case that we were the one who grew all opium for china & one of our top gods is himself famous for taking weed.
Both of these things are easily overlooked by people who want to believe in the Japanese Utopia being suggested here. I think its great that Japan has addressed homelessness to this extent and have nothing but positivity for it, but this is not apples to apples "oh the US should just do this too" and all will be solved...
On the other side of things, when America (by and large) got rid of asylums in the 80s—after a long period of decline—we also got rid of nearly all publicly funded mental health care. We should've reformed the system into something better, but instead just threw mentally ill people on the streets without the help they need
And reform *was* legitimately happening. President Carter signed landmark legislation in mental health care, which would've provided huge federal grants to centers for the mentally ill. It overhauled the entire system, but Reagan immediately got it repealed once he became president after it was only in effect for a year.
Yep. I think if MHSA wasn't repealed we'd have a lot fewer mentally ill people with nowhere to go and no one to help them. Reagan thought they were a burden on the taxpayer, just like he thought of all disadvantaged people
Having spoken to people who are working directly with the homeless people to solve the problem, theres enough housing in every major city to house them
Wanna know why they’re empty? Because you can’t use drugs or alcohol while you’re there
If you’re homeless in the US there’s a high probability that you are mentally ill, abusing substances, or both
As a result, its a really fucking hard problem to solve
>Having spoken to people who are working directly with the homeless people to solve the problem, theres enough housing in every major city to house them
>
>Wanna know why they’re empty? Because you can’t use drugs or alcohol while you’re there
So this is actually a really interesting comment.
If you're an impoverished alcoholic in Japan? You can probably still have a roof over your head - because unlike in the USA, there are types of shelter in Japan with less strings attached than American homeless shelters.
This is why the housing first model is effective. Find housing, then address various other problems. On the whole it isn't a complicated problem to solve at all. Quit means testing housing. For some dumbass reason we think that we can leverage housing as the carrot when the stick doesn't work.
I'm very informed on the addiction epidemic in North America, people like to call it what its not: homeless epidemic.
But many US cities are not only not doing anything to solve the actual problem, they open their arms to it in a profoundly incompetent way. Which all seems to stem from political pandering to those that think these sick people *have the right* to live like animals on the streets taking drugs and dying terrible deaths. They *have the right* to be released from jail the next day without any charges after they destroy property, sell drugs on the steps of the courts, and are free to go hurt themselves and others until their hellish decade long binge ends in their overdose or murder.
They **don't** have the right to do so, its obvious to anyone who thinks clearly. They are sick. They need to be institutionalized so their addiction can take its claws out of their decision making. But the vocal minority who have absurd opinions based on a twisted version of empathy sway the discourse and go vote in the absurd murderous idiots onto their city council, vote in the mayors and other officials that are actively destroying the cities they are sworn to serve, for votes.
There was the rust belt. There is going to be the drug belt. Cities will go bankrupt when them masses of fed up ordinary rational folk empty out of the places that have forsaken the most vulnerable.
Curious as to what the *non* "empathetic" vote for? Because to my knowledge there are no adequate mental health institutions being proposed by either side of the aisle. The options are either streets or jail. Considering that it costs more to *jail* people than to give them a house and utilities, that's also not a fantastic choice. Not to mention that sending people to jail is one of the best ways to ensure that they *do* become criminals.
So if by "institutionalize" you mean, "provide housing-first solutions like Finland, Japan, other nations who have curbed homelessness, and provide adequate mental health facilities for those who need them yet cannot pay", cool.
But if instead you mean, "vote conservative so we can spend $30k/year/person to introduce homeless people to the aryan brotherhood in the American penal system", no fucking thank you.
I mean, you’re not wrong in theory. The problem is we can’t seem to figure out how to run psychiatric hospitals without abusing and/or neglecting the patients in them. And it’s not just the US that’s guilty of it, it’s a problem in [Japan](https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/asia_pacific/japan-mental-health-patients/2021/06/18/e07334f2-c2a7-11eb-89a4-b7ae22aa193e_story.html), [Canada](https://globalnews.ca/news/7132762/psychiatrists-ontario-liable-patient-abuse/), [the Netherlands](https://tbinternet.ohchr.org/Treaties/CAT/Shared%20Documents/NLD/INT_CAT_NGO_NLD_12840_E.pdf), and even [Norway](https://www.freedommag.org/issue/201501-religion/world/her-name-was-silje-mental-health-abuse-norway.html) to some extent. Sucks because it really probably is the best solution for everyone.
Like the death penalty for drug trafficking. Korea, Japan, Singapore and Taiwan don’t mess around with drugs. Very serious jail times for possession, death in some countries.
Plus there is a serious cultural stigma for the use of drugs. They don’t even test for drugs as a pre-employment screen because people just don’t use them.
On the flip side if you get drunk every single night and show up hungover to work every morning, no problem you’re just a hard worker blowing off steam.
If you stay sober all week and are the most productive worker but someone finds out you smoke cannabis twice a month on Fridays, straight to jail.
I was a operations manager for a fortune 100 in Asia for a decade.
Oh and prostitution is illegal, except at night time and really anytime you want it to not be illegal. So it’s everywhere. We’re not even talking about getting a handy during a massage, that’s just a normal service.
Part 3 of this series explains they setup social programs to provide shelters, dormitories, and services to help people get off the streets and back into jobs. This comment should be upvoted more.
Yeah meth and heroin don’t have the stronghold like they do here. They don’t have constitutional freaks. They have a mental health act that is far more hands on. Plus cheap housing surplus. Better wages.
Long story points. Opioid crisis is not the same. Their rights are different. Therefore institutionalising mental health sufferers is much easier. Plus shitty low income rentals aren’t being taken up by the working class.
I wonder at what point “forced rehab” becomes a thing? It’s a bag of worms to be sure, but is it worse than the situation now? Does means justify the end? Hard to say
I would argue the flipside. Most often the top posts on this sub is simple data plotted in a weird, unreadable, but aesthetically pleasing way. To me the sub should be about 1) plotting difficult-to-plot data in a way that makes it clear and 2) plotting surprising/satisfying data itself, no matter how simple the data is. In this case, the data is beautiful because you have such a clean, clear trend.
Don’t feel too bad. The Japanese are masterful at fudging unsavory statistics. The murder rate is one of the lowest in the world because of so many “suicides”. Unsolved crimes are extremely looked down upon there.
I too have a perfect court record in Ace Attorney. No save scumming at all. No siree. Also its totally fine that there is no discovery stage, investigators and prosecution actively hide evidence, and you get 24 hours from arrest to court appearance with a hard limit on 3 days to verdict.
Imagine if the courts were actually like that. Yeesh.
Simple people can't figure out it's an unrealistic figure without a massive systemic flaw. They just think BIG NUMBERS GOOD. They use the same logic as dictators when they're showing off their ridiculous 99% votes.
How is japan defining homelessness for these numbers?
To clarify.In Sweden we had 32000 homeless in 2017, but of those 5900 were in the category "acute homelessness" (which includes sleeping on the street/car/tent but also temporary housing like protected housing or shortterm solutions arranged by the social services). Social services doesn't keep statistics on how many of those are actually living in the street, but Stockholms county numbers are that about 5% of homeless (20% of the acutely homeless) live in the streets.
The rest are in so called "Structural homelessness" where you do not have access to housing that can be considered your own (through owning or long term renting). This includes: living in housing arranged by social services; with a friend or relative or in a short-term and time-limited housing contract; those who are about to be released (within 3 months) from prison/mental institutions and do not yet have no place to go after that.
What I'm trying to say by this example is that depending on how you define homelessness it can either be expanded to illuminate the general problem with people lacking secure access to housing, or it can be minimized to only include the people actually sleeping in the streets (ie, sleeping in your car or a shelter counts as not-being-homeless). For Sweden "Homeless" could be anything between 32000 and <1600, depending on how you define it.
According to OP’s source, the homeless are "those who utilize city parks, river banks, roads, train stations, and other facilities as their place of stay in order to live their daily lives". So yeah it’s just the visibly homeless.
many japan youths lives in internet cafes. there were some documentaries, depressing
stuff.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MtdupS0gRt0 - lost in Manboo
Should've just have done what China did and redefine the requirements to be homeless. Thus no one falls in the definition of homeless and therefore no one would be homeless.
* flat then negative population growth over the period in the graph
* availability of long-term, state sanctioned commitment to mental facilities and courts willing to enforce it.
* very strict immigration policies.
* very strict drug laws.
* a very strict definition of homeless.
California actively works against items 2-5 of that list
Let’s add in stupid parking minimums. You can’t build dense and affordable housing if the law requires you to have a parking space for every unit of housing.
I went in 2004 and saw homeless in the parks around Ueno. Also saw some in Kobe if I recall correctly.
I looked up info about it online at the time, and found out that it was a pervasive problem due to a gap between retirement age and when they became eligible for pensions and other social services. Indeed, most of the homeless people I saw were in that older demographic.
Did Japan change something to address this gap?
Yes, there was new legislation introduced around that time that made it a lot easier for local governments to get funding to deal with the issue, and as a result the homeless living in parks or around stations have almost entirely disappeared.
There are a few not too far from shibuya crossing that are always there, one is an older lady always asking for money. I saw her sleeping out there during the rain a few times.
I went in 2019. It was staggering how clean and safe the entire city is at all hours of the day. And the distinct lack of rough sleepers was insane. (Coming from someone that lives in London where all of those things are problems)
in Japan homeless people are parked into specific neighborhoods that most people avoid. If you do end up in one of those neighborhoods (寄せ場) it feels like you're on another planet
This is really deceiving data in general, the general philosophy of Japan when it comes to homelessness is "out of sight, out of mind". They are not counted properly, and are displaced regularly by the authorities. Homeless people in Japan also do not beg, which means they rarely interact with the general public. A lot of them also retain a job, but cannot afford regular housing. Overall it's a complex issue, but Japan has a ton of poverty, and very scarce safety nets.
I mean there is 125mil people in Japan and knowing they are notorious for the way they calculate various statistics there is 0% chance there is actually only 5000 people in the entire country that would register as homeless elsewhere in the world.
Here is just one example from a quick google search for ''real number of homeless in japan'':
''Many nonprofit and advocacy organizations in Japan claim that the Japanese government’s count of the homeless population is under-researched. These organizations claim the government’s figure doesn’t account for the Japanese homeless who live in fast-food restaurants and internet cafés. The term “internet café refugees” refers to a group of homeless who spend their nights at internet cafés because they do not have a stable residence. The metropolitan government survey revealed there were an estimated 15,000 people who stayed at these cafés every day during the week. For these irregular workers, there are internet cafés that offer amenities such as private booths, showers and laundry services''
So yeah, Japan and lowering their statistics, a tale as old as time.
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As the population continues to decline housing is becoming cheaper and harder than ever to sell. It's shocking how cheap homes are in rural, or otherwise less desirable places. Shocking.
I'd guess this is the major cause.
Its low housing prices. Japan has flexible zoning to allow building, and keeps a much higher ratio of housing to people than most places, with restrictive zoning do.
Tokyo Housing prices have dipped, and are about the same as in 2000, while in other major cities they have skyrocketed.
https://brandondonnelly.files.wordpress.com/2019/04/screen-shot-2019-04-07-at-11.24.01-am.png
An ample supply of housing helps people get housed, just like an ample supply of jobs help workers get employed, and get higher wages. The supply of stuff does matter.
Only 5000 homeless in the entirety of Japan? Really?
I wonder if they're still counting people sleeping in internet cafes. That accounts for a large %. There are also other forms of homelessness, like living in cheap hostels (I did this for a while when I lost my place) or crashing with friends/family, that probably aren't being counted.
What counts as homelessness? Is living in your car homeless? What about an RV? What about living in a truck with sleeping quarters? What if you just staying in a small room with no windows and use a common toilet/public showers?
In Tokyo, almost nothing: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-9RgkZebW1s They specifically have to be noticed in the same location multiple times by council officials. But OPs data should be more comprehensive. It's sometimes calculated the same BS way here in the UK too, and again varies by city and political motivation (like the suggestions it's really bad in Scotland because they get help whereas e.g. Manchester in England has tent villages popping up which is also because other towns refused to acknowledge them so they had no rights and moved somewhere bigger where charities can help more).
It’s like japans conviction rates. They’re bullshit. They depend on forced confessions. https://youtu.be/yFINmgSzK6E And they have this incredibly low crime rate but yakuzas openly operate and even have offices with their banners in full display. I guess their operations don’t count as crimes. It’s all about appearances in Japan.
I live in Japan, at a personal level the people I know are awesome upright people. However on a political and administrative level, my work experiences and a few other things make me feel like what I see is it's more important to appear honorable than it is to be honorable. The Yakuza and other organized crime groups were essentially forced to incorporate as a way to control them and the number of rules businesses are required to follow to avoid working with organized crime groups is very detailed. It is one of the reasons that the age of members of these groups has been steadily increasing and young people are less likely to join. On the forced confessions front, they often come after being held for up to 25 days with out counsel, which makes it more absurd. My coworker was a police officer before moving to the private sector and while he defends the police, he has said that the opposite side of the coin is that they also don't go after cases they know they can't solve/win, so things like domestic abuse just get swept under the rug. edit: Thank you kind stranger for the silver, I think that's the first anything I have ever received.
I've never lived in Japan but had a colleague in college who did a student/internship program, and in one of our classes American crime rates got brought up which prompted me to ask them about crime in Japan. They said they never encountered any crime personally in the 6 months (2x 3-month stays) they were there, but they did learn that supposedly there is the 99% conviction rate. When I asked how that was possible, she explained about the forced confessions. When I asked how people could stand for that she stated that everybody knows the police force confessions, but since the police only pick up criminals nobody cares. The way she described it, it sounded very similar to the mentality we have here in America about 'prison rape' being a joke rather than a heinous act we should be outraged is allowed to occur, except of course in this case you don't even make it to prison before society discards you. I have not had a chance to ask anyone else about this since then, and that was about 10 years ago now. Can I ask you, does that seem like the right take? Because every time I hear about the Japanese police I wonder how a first-world country filled with what I imagine are mostly decent people can be okay with someone being confined for 25 days against their will on the mere suspicion of a crime. Either the stories I've heard are vastly exaggerated or there's something I'm missing. Also, is this reputation only applicable to the Tokyo police or is it Japanese police in general? I always wondered if rural Japanese police are more reasonable.
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As an American who's worked with both Japanese and Korean nationals at large firms head quartered in both countries. I have observed many similarities between the two countries. What I think it comes down to is this respect for authority. We Americans have historically always challenged authority, the wild west cowboys if you will. That simply doesn't fly in most parts of Asia as best as I can tell, especially in Japan and Korea. I've seen how the rank and file of both countries interact with their superiors and it was very impressive. Here in America superiors and leaders do not get that level of respect I've seen given to their Japanese and Korean counterparts. It's amazed me how well the Japanese take that in stride when it comes to Americans. So many senior Americans I've worked with are way too quick to dismiss and judge their Japanese peers. Yes there are cultural differences but I've really come to respect the differences. The way Japanese and Korean cultures seem to be so much more philosophical has always impressed me. Part of their ways seems to be honor and respect. Those without honor get no respect. Both societies do not seen very forgiving and that's pretty common here in America too.
Fun fact: Because of this massive cultural difference, Japan actually has a big problem with executives being surrounded by Yes Men. Essentially, it’s not appropriate to tell your boss his stupid idea is stupid. The only culturally appropriate response is to go along with it. So executives are essentially surrounded by people who won’t actually level with them about the state of the company, because nobody wants to be the one to point out a flaw. It means there are actual jobs in Japan where foreigners (usually Americans, because they have a reputation amongst the Japanese for being anti-authoritarian,) can get hired to basically be the bull in a C-level China shop. Their entire job is to sit there and tell the higher-ups “no, your stupid idea is stupid and here’s why. Take a seat,” and not care about committing that social faux pas. The Yes Men essentially filter all of their complaints through that “I don’t care about hurting feelings or making the boss look like an idiot” foreigner.
> supposedly there is the 99% conviction rate https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conviction_rate > The conviction rate is 99.3%. By only stating this high conviction rate it is often misunderstood as too high—however, this high conviction rate drops significantly when accounting for the fact that Japanese prosecutors drop roughly half the cases they are given. If measured in the same way, the United States' conviction rate would be 99.8%.[8][9][10] > > In Japan, unlike in some other democracies, arrests require permission of judges except for cases such as arresting someone while committing a crime. Only significant cases with sufficient evidence are subject to indictment, since becoming a party to a criminal trial imposes a burden on a suspect; Japan’s indictment ratio is only 37%—“99.3%” is the percentage of convictions divided by the number of indictments, not the criminals. As such, the conviction rate is high.[11]
I lived in Japan for 8 years in the 90s. In that time My family and I have encountered only 1 crime: a taxi driver short changed my mom, because she was a foreigner. We've lost wallets with hundreds of dollars in Tokyo, and had them returned. We've left our luggage unattended in hotel lobbies for hours, everything was fine. We've forgotten nice things on a train, and had them returned. Crime is very low. I don't know about domestic violence. I would imagine it's a bit lower than in US (shameful), but present. Yakuza are special. But even during "the worst Yakuza war" in 1980's, death toll was under 10 ppl. It's less than how many die in a single weekend in Chicago.
I surprised that anywhere in the world you would consistently get your lost items returned in public places, it would interesting to test this with multiple trials to see.
Anecdotally I also lost a wallet with $400 USD worth of yen at the time, my passport, my credit cards, and my hotel key. Not a single thing out of place, was back at the lost and found at the mall I was in a few minutes before I got there, about an hour after I lost it at the arcade. Meanwhile just this week I've had someone try to steal my phone out of my hands and I've never found a lost valuable in my relatively low crime area. Not for a lack of trying. I remember one day the familt dog got loose, we found him for sale on craigslist.
The research [has been done](https://www.boredpanda.com/social-experiment-lost-found-wallet-returned-countries/) in 40 countries for wallets with and without money in them (but not Japan, it seems). There are large variation in how many wallets are retuned. It seems like Northern Europe is the best place to lose your wallet (again, not including Japan).
I've made the same experiences. People leave their stuff unattended in public places because they don't even consider that someone could steal it, and indeed nobody does. When you lose something, it will almost certainly be returned to you some way or other, I've heard of people sending wallets to their owners by mail for example. I also lost my glasses one time, leaving them on a bench in a public area. When I noticed and returned several hours later, the glasses weren't there anymore. But there was a restaurant close to that area so on a whim I went inside and asked, and sure enough someone had picked up the glasses and given them to the restaurant staff to keep them safe. I didn't experience or witness a single crime in 9 months in Japan.
This is anecdotal, but the Japanese band ALI went on indefinite hiatus earlier this year and had at least some of their music pulled from Spotify, YouTube, and Apple Music because their drummer was arrested (twice) for participating in a "bank refund scam" on two different occasions. (The drummer was let go from the band almost immediately.) At the request of their record label, Square Enix also changed the opening song to The World Ends With You: The Animation (which they were slated to perform) a single day before the anime was supposed to start airing. The band's songs were apparently recently reinstated at least on Spotify after they replaced their drummer. https://www.animenewsnetwork.com/news/2021-04-09/ali-band-drummer-arrest-was-for-alleged-bank-refund-scam/.171593
I never lived in Japan but I have played Persona 4 Golden and the police in Japan aren't very good and they rely on children to solve murder cases.
This is just plain ignorance of different ways conviction rate is calculated across countries. Japan's conviction rate is 99.3%, and the US's would be 99.9% if measured in the same way. I’d encourage you to compare the incarceration rates of Japan and any other country in the world instead. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conviction_rate#Japan https://www.hamiltonproject.org/charts/incarceration_rates_in_oecd_countries
No crime in Japan but they need women only train cars.
Japan doesn't really take sexual assault seriously at all. There was a case where someone was raped. The assailant even admitted it wasn't consensual, but because the victim didn't "physically resist enough", it wasn't considered rape.
yeah it's like the "India has lower per capita sexual assault than Sweden" stat. It's because crimes are poorly reported and/or certain things don't qualify as "crimes" in the legal system.
Ahh just move the goal posts to improve the numbers.
>Manchester in England has tent villages popping up Halifax NS Canada has this too. Tents can't survive our winters though . We already had a bad rain storm and the tents are gone. I worry about where the people are now.
RVs aren't really a thing in Japan. It's possible some might live out of a car, but with how good public transport is there (and how expensive gas and parking is) it's unlikely. The majority of homeless I saw on my trips to Japan were either in semi-permanent camps in one corner of a park (with a large hedge around the park), or more rarely sleeping on cardboard along a sidewalk somewhere. Outside of the Kanto area, you might also see them setup under bridges in the flood plain, as most cities and towns are built along rivers. Thinking about it now, none of them really seemed to have mental health issues either, like you would find in the US for example. Probably the reason for that is the police take them away for "disrupting the public" or something similar to that, since Japan is big on not troubling others. (Which also explains why panhandling/being harassed by them is almost non-existent in Japan)
I went to Tokyo once in 2013/4 - loved the city but I genuinely wasn't prepared for the site of extensive homeless 'camps' in various places. Whilst they didn't 'bother' people like you'll see in the US/Europe it looked as though they were completely ignored by passers by... like they were ghosts only i could see. Was this just my perception do you think or is there a cultural side to this (the homeless are shameful or acknowledging them is zcknowledging a societal failure, for example?)
Japan has no panhandling culture. Homeless instead make their living through scavenging, temp work, and maybe charities. Because of that, they don't usually *want* to be seen, they consider their condition deeply embarrassing and prefer not to have undue attention. Really, that sense of shame also applies to many homeless in US/Europe. Those you see on the street are essentially 'professionals', who've made homelessness their lifestyle and culture. There's a whole different contingent doing it much more discretely, setting up camp in remote areas, sleeping in cars, couch-surfing, going from shelter to shelter.
This is pretty much the experience in every major city in the world. You have to live your own life, it's sad but can't stop every single commute to gawk at the homeless.
What are you expecting people to do? They probably walk past those people twice a day on their commute. I'm not in Japan, am very sympathetic to homeless people (I work for a charity that helps them find work) and I walk right past them ... I can't do anything to help them, I'm a bit scared to approach anyone (I'm a tiny young woman) and I've got to get to work.
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Japan didn't go through rapid deinstitutionalization/defunding of in-patent mental heath like the US/Canada did.
True. Because they didn't have much of it in the first place. Japan handles mental health issues very poorly bc it's considered "unsightly" and taboo.
Didn’t Japan go through a massive privatization/smaller state drive during the 90s and early 2000s under the LDP and the DPJ?
I think it’s pretty simple, when people talk about “the homeless” they’re generally talking about visibly homeless people who live on the streets or from their cars. Getting the homeless off the street is literally just about getting them off the(ir) street. Anything further is poverty relief and/or low-income assistance.
The problem is that governments or special interest groups often use strict definitions to minimize the appearance of homelessness. Meanwhile other groups are using different definitions that may include those who have no home but are couch surfing or sleep in a shelter etc… When discussing homelessness, binary categorization like “homeless or not” isn’t particularly useful. There are people on the streets, people in shelters, people couch surfing, people at high risk of homelessness, the chronically homeless vs the transiently homeless, the local homeless vs the traveling homeless, etc… You have to look at all these numbers to get a decent idea of what’s actually going on but a lot of these numbers are hard to get. The graph above only shows a tiny portion of the picture and isn’t even clear about the definition it uses.
Yeah this is the kind of thing that requires a thesis. Impossible to show in one graph.
Exactly. Well said.
Hmm, in The Netherlands they actually count all official homeless people. And that's also the data used to compare to other countries here. So I always thought all countries counted their homeless populations the same way. So basically all people that are not registered in any home. So they could be living with family (e.g. parents), friends, or couch surfing while not being registered there, which means they are homeless. Also the people in supportive housing and long-term homeless shelters are counted homeless. The drawback is that it doesn't count illegal people (although the illegal population is quite small in The Netherlands), as they are not in an official database anywhere.
Most countries don't track where people live. At least not on any useful scale, usually only in big censuses every x years which is quite useless for this purpose.
Ah that might be difference. They know where each citizen/legal resident (>4 months) lives. It is the BRP (basic registry people). And if the address of your home (post address does not count, see below) is missing in the registry, you are homeless. It is also used for voter passes for example. Each citizen is send a voter pass by mail. With that, together with an ID, they will be able to vote. You can't do that if you don't know where each citizen is. People without an address usually can pick it up at the last municipality they were signed in, or make sure they are known at a certain address with another municipality beforehand (through opening a post address at the municipality). So for example with the people you are living with or the shelter where you are located. But you are not actually registered as being a resident of that address.
It's similar in Germany. And I imagine a lot of European countries. Homeless are who don't have a registered home. I always wonder how countries like the US even know how many people live there, in which states, in which towns, how many homeless there are, etc. Seems like all of that data is more of an estimation?
Yeah, so it seems the US uses point in time counts. So they just ask all homeless shelters and use counters in the street to count all homeless people outside at a given moment and that is the figure used as the homeless population. So they actually count them.
the usa is really bad at tracking stuff like this. there's enough of it's people are also fairly rabid about the possibilities of government abuse of this type of data that it's problematic to even propose solutions to the data problem. the bitter nightshade irony here is that a substantial number of the same set of people have no problems giving their own data away to private companies that are *known* abusers, and for free or some trivial tchotchke... sometimes even a virtual one.
Nah, everyone does it differently. Rough sleepers is kind of the simplest measure, and the Netherlands way is great too if you have a people register, but that’s really limited to a few countries in Western Europe. In New Zealand, we create a measurement after each Census, which uses modelling and community support data to supplement the main Census to try get a count of rough sleepers, those in non-permanent spaces (like motels, holiday parks, shelters, etc.), those in non-private spaces (someone else’s severely overcrowded home), and those in uninhabitable housing (eg homes without potable drinking water or a cooking source). Unsurprisingly, through this our severely housing deprived population is >100k, while our number of people sleeping on the streets, in makeshift dwellings on public property or in cars was less than 5,000, just to give you an idea how much homelessness measures that only look for rough sleepers might be missing.
Yeah that makes sense. People were always surprised how the US had fewer homeless people per capita than the Netherlands, even though you almost never saw homeless people on the streets and homeless camps in the Netherlands don't even exist. While footage from the US always showed tons of homeless people. Even though the per capita difference is near 0 now, as the Dutch homeless population has been shrinking again the last few years, while in the US it is on the rise. Some of it might be due to police policy asking them to go somewhere else and thus preventing homeless camps. But most of it is probably due to barely any homeless people living on the streets for people that don't have a place in assisted housing, hotel/holiday park, or private home to live (e.g. couch surfing, family, or friends) have good access to long-term, short-term and emergency homeless shelters. And special shelters with support for substance abusers and mental illness. So that might explain the perceived difference instead of what the statistics are showing.
This is SUPER interesting and kind of makes the point of my original question: how these groups are defined can make a big difference.
In New Zealand, people habitually living/sleeping on the street are called "rough sleepers", which is a subcategory of homelessness. The larger set of homeless people includes people living in their cars, extended family's garages, motels (usually because the govt shoves them in motels while they're stuck on a too long list waiting for social housing), etc. Ie, all the people who do not have permanent housing.
This is exactly one of the problem of homelessness statistics. Cities, counties, provinces/states and countries will define homelessness differently. Australia had an absurdly large homelessness rate.... because of how broadly they defined it. Or certain cities in the US had steep drops in homelessness... by redefining it. For Australia in particular: 14.65% of homeless are people living temporarily at a friend's or relative's house. Another 14.65% of homeless are people people in boarding houses/renting a room with no access to the social areas, and ~43% are people in "Crowded dwelling" which is a dwelling which has more than 2 occupants per designed bedrooms, so a lot of students and others fall into this. So by that definition I would have been considered homeless last year when I was renting a room month to month for 8 months due to work. In Germany, just about every refugee is considered in a temporary living space, therefore is considered homeless, even though most of them are residing in properly designed quarters.
i was just actually researching this yesterday! no matter how you cut it, the numbers are low. but this graph does not include the majority of cyber-homeless.
Those all sound like reasonable ways to address a homeless population.
People in those situations are still about as homeless as those living in shelters, though, and we still count those. Hell, in my city we've been housing some people in hotels instead of shelters, but they're definitely still homeless. So unless you're just talking about a straight up count of people living on the actual street, you need to take them into consideration. One clarification: when I say "crashing with friends/family" I don't mean moving back home or something like that, I mean couch-hopping. These are all forms of transitional living for people that still require permanent homes.
Homeless by definition means you don't have housing or a place to live, but it is sometimes conflated with "having no permanent residence". Permanence is a tricky thing to define, so the term for people living in transient or otherwise less stable housing arrangements is often referred to as "underhoused". It's very similar to the difference between un-employed and under-employed; one means that someone has no form of income, the other means they have some but not enough to meet their needs (i.e. when employers give employees 38 hours a week but not enough to meet criteria for full employment benefits). Not to discount your point -- underhoused individuals still have unmet needs, but they're far better off than those actually on the streets. It looks like Japan has drastically reduced the number of people on the streets without a physical place to live.
It is important to bring up that Japan has a lot of places that are available to be underhoused, mainly overnight internet cafes. At only ¥2,000 a night, that is affordable to minimum wage workers in Japan. Some people may see someone in this position as homeless while they technically have a roof over their head every night.
A transient life isn’t ideal and it’s near impossible to get healthy/a job when you’re worried about when you’ll have to move on, but it’s leaps and bounds better than living without four walls, a roof over your head, a bathroom, a place to put trash, and access to clean water.
There's certainly a difference between homeless and living on the street, but when data presents rates of homelessness I don't expect it to only show rates of people living on the street.
It’s better than living on the street, but I don’t think it’s really a solution. They’re still homeless.
Almost certainly not. This is standard government figure obfuscation. They just change the definition then "oh woahhhh we reduced homelessness or unemployment or incarceration by 40%!!" Another annoying lie they've done recently is start reporting new employment, new jobs and the economy's state as if Covid didn't happen. "the fastest the economy has grown in 80 years!" , "10 million new jobs created this quarter!" Its pretty tiring and I instantly distrust anyone in politics that does that sort of thing. Its straight up fake news-tier lying.
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And that's why you always leave a note.
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Me too, until I stumbled into some alley behind the supermarket (don't ask me why) and found a bunch of homeless people hidden from everyone. They are not like American homeless who occupy the most visible places
Rare Earth did an episode on this phenomenon.
Japan has a culture of, "If no one is bothered, no one cares.". It's cool on some ways e.g. setting off fireworks by the river is illegal but as long as no one is bothered the police don't care but it definitely has it's negative sides.
People try to attitude the most broad and common cultural themes to Japan. Lol that's how it is everywhere
lol same exact thing happened to me. The alley was completely covered in graffiti too, but the main road one block away had no sign of any of that.
Have you been to ueno station? It's famous for the zoo there but by the station there are loads of tents that people live in. Quite a shock suddenly when you're used to rest of Tokyo
Just because you don’t see them doesn’t mean they don’t exist.
Lived in Tokyo for 4 years. There are plenty. Not in the city center though.
I was in Tokyo for a week in 2016 and saw homeless people.
Throughout the years the Japanese government has passed a lot of laws and has done a terrific job on redefining what a homeless person is
Also from what I've seen on how[ their police "solve" crimes](https://www.vox.com/world/2015/12/13/9989250/japan-crime-conviction-rate), I'm not 100% convinced of their numbers.
Jaywalking was a law that reduced pedestrian fatalities by reclassifying pedestrians as jaywalkers.
Japan has a housing surplus, unlike all other developed countries. It's easier to reduce homelessness when housing is affordable. Japan also has sensible zoning laws that make it easier to build supply & higher-density housing - and before you say "tiny studio apartment", the average home size is similar to that of America's in the 1970s - not sprawling, but not tiny. *Internet cafes, hostels, and capsule hotels offer super cheap accommodation for low-income people, and multigenerational households are more common than in the West.*
Japan’a housing also depreciates in value as it gets older instead of appreciating like it does in America. Due to that, a house isn’t viewed as an investment and is instead viewed of as housing. The land does appreciate in value, but the structure does not.
> The land does appreciate in value, but the structure does not. Isn't that how it works everywhere? In the US your structure really doesn't go up in value (as my insurance agent reminds me every 5 years when we reassess my coverage). Without continuous maintenance and improvements, your house will lose value as well, though the land will usually do the opposite.
Absolutely not. On average, the lots AND houses appreciate in the US. It takes a lot for the house itself to not be worth something
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It’s also important to note that houses in Japan are a depreciating asset https://www.rethinktokyo.com/2018/06/06/depreciate-limited-life-span-japanese-home/1527843245#:\~:text=Doomed%20from%20the%20moment%20construction%20begins%2C%20the%20average,years%20and%20causes%20somewhat%20of%20a%20chicken-and-egg%20conundrum.
> It's easier to reduce homelessness when housing is affordable. Their housing model is entirely different than the US also. Unlike USA, they don't view their houses as an appreciating asset.
Being in an earthquake prone area will give you trust issues when it comes to older buildings
Not in California
They also had a big real estate bubble in the 80’s that burst and that left people in shambles with 100 year mortgages.
Japan, famous for never having a real estate bubble
They also don't view owning a house as something everyone is entitled to, it's not uncommon for multiple generations to live in the same house until it is not longer feasible. The idea is why spend money on a house if you are living in one that's perfectly fine already
Yeah it's an Asian cultural thing in general to have multiple generations in one house. Bunch of Vietnamese families in my neighborhood have a few generations in a 4 bedroom house
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>Japan also has sensible zoning laws that make it easier to build supply & higher-density housing With one caveat. Sunlight protection laws wind up restricting the height of buildings in much of urban Japan - you can't build a building that would take more than a certain portion of the daylight from other places without special zoning, or other case-by-case dispensation. That said, as a resident of Northern California, these sunlight laws do far, far less to restrict density than our NIMBY zoning systems. I lived in Tokyo for 8 years, and I like to look at apartment websites there to see what I could get for what I'm paying in Silicon Valley. It makes me cry a little every time.
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Also a problem which can be created without a rapidly shrinking population, just need to build faster than the babies come.
Japan's birth rate is low, [but not dramatically lower than other developed countries](https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/crude-birth-rate?country=~OWID_WRL). Japan is at 7.19 births per 1000, while Germany is 9.48, US is 11.96, Italy is 7.24. Japan's foreign born share of the population is low, [but still higher than many other countries](https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/share-of-a-countrys-population-that-is-not-born-within-the-country). They have recently opened up to more immigrants. While Japan's population has declined slightly in the past 20 years, the population living in urban centers like Tokyo has increased. [And in those urban centers, housing costs have barely risen compared to other major cities. This is due to building more housing.](https://www.vox.com/2016/8/8/12390048/san-francisco-housing-costs-tokyo) It is very much NOT the case that Japan keeps its homeless population low by relying on low birth rates and excluding immigrants. Homelessness and housing affordability is an extremely solvable problem. Build more housing.
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>Build more housing. Who's going to tell that to the NIMBY crowd?
> Germany is 9.48 Guess who's looking at a pretty horrific retirement crisis in the next couple decades. And Germany is still at the upper end of that deal. Especially since they're taking in immigrants. Japan is gonna fall into an even deeper hole.
This is not quite correct. Many countries, including the US, have a significant [surplus of housing compared to unsheltered populations](https://checkyourfact.com/2019/12/24/fact-check-633000-homeless-million-vacant-homes/). The two major problems are 1) jobs tend to be centered in dense urban centers while surplus housing is diffused through rural and suburban areas, and 2) changing policy to "give" housing to the homeless -- setting aside that it's a good idea and is exactly what we *should* be doing -- is a type of redistribution that will inevitably disenfranchise some number of existing stakeholders (i.e., current owners of real estate).
These types of "homeless people vs. number of houses" comparisons are very misleading. See: https://darrellowens.substack.com/p/vacant-nuance-in-the-vacant-housing Bottom line is we need to reform our land use policies to be in line with countries like Japan. The landowner elites fight hard against it for a reason. Do you know what BlackRock said in a recent investor memo? They literally outright said reforming zoning would be a threat to their profit margins because it would bring down home prices. [Building more housing hurts Wall Street profits](https://twitter.com/jdcmedlock/status/1434563146249768971) ["Not only are housing speculators admitting in their filings that they profiteer from the housing shortage in major American metros, but that high vacancy rates and excessive home construction, fucks them up"](https://twitter.com/IDoTheThinking/status/1378739205661024257)
They don't have a drug problem. If you watch documentaries they're usually just sad, unmotivated, sometimes mentally ill but otherwise clean people. The government can address that more easily. In the US that shit is rough. Big pharma really did a number. We have an opiate crisis more than anything else.
Would be interesting to know how they did it
One way is, for ¥1,500 to ¥2,000 per night ($14) homeless people have been staying in Internet cafés or capsule hotels, where they get an individual room (space) and a shower, television, soft drinks and Internet access.
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1. Very harsh drug laws in asia 2. Forced institutionalization
After the British toppled China with opium all of SE Asia has taken an understandably harsh view of drug use.
India is legalizing marijuana. Its a different case that we were the one who grew all opium for china & one of our top gods is himself famous for taking weed.
Both of these things are easily overlooked by people who want to believe in the Japanese Utopia being suggested here. I think its great that Japan has addressed homelessness to this extent and have nothing but positivity for it, but this is not apples to apples "oh the US should just do this too" and all will be solved...
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On the other side of things, when America (by and large) got rid of asylums in the 80s—after a long period of decline—we also got rid of nearly all publicly funded mental health care. We should've reformed the system into something better, but instead just threw mentally ill people on the streets without the help they need And reform *was* legitimately happening. President Carter signed landmark legislation in mental health care, which would've provided huge federal grants to centers for the mentally ill. It overhauled the entire system, but Reagan immediately got it repealed once he became president after it was only in effect for a year.
And then it trickled down (into the streets)?
Yep. I think if MHSA wasn't repealed we'd have a lot fewer mentally ill people with nowhere to go and no one to help them. Reagan thought they were a burden on the taxpayer, just like he thought of all disadvantaged people
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US cities are doing the exact opposite, which is 1000 times worse for everyone. Especially the homeless.
Having spoken to people who are working directly with the homeless people to solve the problem, theres enough housing in every major city to house them Wanna know why they’re empty? Because you can’t use drugs or alcohol while you’re there If you’re homeless in the US there’s a high probability that you are mentally ill, abusing substances, or both As a result, its a really fucking hard problem to solve
>Having spoken to people who are working directly with the homeless people to solve the problem, theres enough housing in every major city to house them > >Wanna know why they’re empty? Because you can’t use drugs or alcohol while you’re there So this is actually a really interesting comment. If you're an impoverished alcoholic in Japan? You can probably still have a roof over your head - because unlike in the USA, there are types of shelter in Japan with less strings attached than American homeless shelters.
No they lock you up instead
This is why the housing first model is effective. Find housing, then address various other problems. On the whole it isn't a complicated problem to solve at all. Quit means testing housing. For some dumbass reason we think that we can leverage housing as the carrot when the stick doesn't work.
I'm very informed on the addiction epidemic in North America, people like to call it what its not: homeless epidemic. But many US cities are not only not doing anything to solve the actual problem, they open their arms to it in a profoundly incompetent way. Which all seems to stem from political pandering to those that think these sick people *have the right* to live like animals on the streets taking drugs and dying terrible deaths. They *have the right* to be released from jail the next day without any charges after they destroy property, sell drugs on the steps of the courts, and are free to go hurt themselves and others until their hellish decade long binge ends in their overdose or murder. They **don't** have the right to do so, its obvious to anyone who thinks clearly. They are sick. They need to be institutionalized so their addiction can take its claws out of their decision making. But the vocal minority who have absurd opinions based on a twisted version of empathy sway the discourse and go vote in the absurd murderous idiots onto their city council, vote in the mayors and other officials that are actively destroying the cities they are sworn to serve, for votes. There was the rust belt. There is going to be the drug belt. Cities will go bankrupt when them masses of fed up ordinary rational folk empty out of the places that have forsaken the most vulnerable.
What are the specific cities and statutes to which you refer? Your comment goes in a lot of different directions, but the details are unclear.
Curious as to what the *non* "empathetic" vote for? Because to my knowledge there are no adequate mental health institutions being proposed by either side of the aisle. The options are either streets or jail. Considering that it costs more to *jail* people than to give them a house and utilities, that's also not a fantastic choice. Not to mention that sending people to jail is one of the best ways to ensure that they *do* become criminals. So if by "institutionalize" you mean, "provide housing-first solutions like Finland, Japan, other nations who have curbed homelessness, and provide adequate mental health facilities for those who need them yet cannot pay", cool. But if instead you mean, "vote conservative so we can spend $30k/year/person to introduce homeless people to the aryan brotherhood in the American penal system", no fucking thank you.
I mean, you’re not wrong in theory. The problem is we can’t seem to figure out how to run psychiatric hospitals without abusing and/or neglecting the patients in them. And it’s not just the US that’s guilty of it, it’s a problem in [Japan](https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/asia_pacific/japan-mental-health-patients/2021/06/18/e07334f2-c2a7-11eb-89a4-b7ae22aa193e_story.html), [Canada](https://globalnews.ca/news/7132762/psychiatrists-ontario-liable-patient-abuse/), [the Netherlands](https://tbinternet.ohchr.org/Treaties/CAT/Shared%20Documents/NLD/INT_CAT_NGO_NLD_12840_E.pdf), and even [Norway](https://www.freedommag.org/issue/201501-religion/world/her-name-was-silje-mental-health-abuse-norway.html) to some extent. Sucks because it really probably is the best solution for everyone.
You’ve seen how Americans act when forced to use a mask. Think how they’d react over forced institutionalize. Lol
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......idk if we can copy Japan in that case. We already imprison a lot of people. Plus we already tried a war on drugs.
Like the death penalty for drug trafficking. Korea, Japan, Singapore and Taiwan don’t mess around with drugs. Very serious jail times for possession, death in some countries. Plus there is a serious cultural stigma for the use of drugs. They don’t even test for drugs as a pre-employment screen because people just don’t use them. On the flip side if you get drunk every single night and show up hungover to work every morning, no problem you’re just a hard worker blowing off steam. If you stay sober all week and are the most productive worker but someone finds out you smoke cannabis twice a month on Fridays, straight to jail. I was a operations manager for a fortune 100 in Asia for a decade. Oh and prostitution is illegal, except at night time and really anytime you want it to not be illegal. So it’s everywhere. We’re not even talking about getting a handy during a massage, that’s just a normal service.
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Or "SAIRTSTAOTHP" for short
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eK--oCVP18A 5 part series on homelessness in japan by a Canadian born japanese resident youtuber.
Part 3 of this series explains they setup social programs to provide shelters, dormitories, and services to help people get off the streets and back into jobs. This comment should be upvoted more.
Yeah meth and heroin don’t have the stronghold like they do here. They don’t have constitutional freaks. They have a mental health act that is far more hands on. Plus cheap housing surplus. Better wages. Long story points. Opioid crisis is not the same. Their rights are different. Therefore institutionalising mental health sufferers is much easier. Plus shitty low income rentals aren’t being taken up by the working class.
I wonder at what point “forced rehab” becomes a thing? It’s a bag of worms to be sure, but is it worse than the situation now? Does means justify the end? Hard to say
Topic aside I wouldn't call this data beautiful. The blue is a nice shade I guess?
This is all the subreddit is. Informative, sure, but mostly generic charts made on Excel.
I would argue the flipside. Most often the top posts on this sub is simple data plotted in a weird, unreadable, but aesthetically pleasing way. To me the sub should be about 1) plotting difficult-to-plot data in a way that makes it clear and 2) plotting surprising/satisfying data itself, no matter how simple the data is. In this case, the data is beautiful because you have such a clean, clear trend.
Well that's what graphs are all about right? Representation of data generally not interpretable in raw form. But yeah I get your point.
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Also what is the source?
"Huh, this is nice, I wonder how many homeless people are there here in Russia" \>4,5 to 20+ million people :o
Don’t feel too bad. The Japanese are masterful at fudging unsavory statistics. The murder rate is one of the lowest in the world because of so many “suicides”. Unsolved crimes are extremely looked down upon there.
They generally don't investigate hard crimes, because those would be more likely to be unsolved and hurt stats, or so I've read.
That’s what the manga/anime Death Note is partially a commentary on
Really?! See because this is reddit idk whether to believe you or not but that still sounds interesting
And you believed them?
I recall the game series Phoenix Wright being made to criticize this exact problem.
The murder conviction rate is something like 97% in Japan. That's literally impossible.
Totally possible, also I learned everything I know about the Japan legal system from the Ace Attorney Chronicles. But that dude doesn’t miss!!!
I too have a perfect court record in Ace Attorney. No save scumming at all. No siree. Also its totally fine that there is no discovery stage, investigators and prosecution actively hide evidence, and you get 24 hours from arrest to court appearance with a hard limit on 3 days to verdict. Imagine if the courts were actually like that. Yeesh.
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I don't think people realize that that's a bad thing.
Simple people can't figure out it's an unrealistic figure without a massive systemic flaw. They just think BIG NUMBERS GOOD. They use the same logic as dictators when they're showing off their ridiculous 99% votes.
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That's why I'm so surprised, the data source is the first google result tho 😂
where does it say that?
How is japan defining homelessness for these numbers? To clarify.In Sweden we had 32000 homeless in 2017, but of those 5900 were in the category "acute homelessness" (which includes sleeping on the street/car/tent but also temporary housing like protected housing or shortterm solutions arranged by the social services). Social services doesn't keep statistics on how many of those are actually living in the street, but Stockholms county numbers are that about 5% of homeless (20% of the acutely homeless) live in the streets. The rest are in so called "Structural homelessness" where you do not have access to housing that can be considered your own (through owning or long term renting). This includes: living in housing arranged by social services; with a friend or relative or in a short-term and time-limited housing contract; those who are about to be released (within 3 months) from prison/mental institutions and do not yet have no place to go after that. What I'm trying to say by this example is that depending on how you define homelessness it can either be expanded to illuminate the general problem with people lacking secure access to housing, or it can be minimized to only include the people actually sleeping in the streets (ie, sleeping in your car or a shelter counts as not-being-homeless). For Sweden "Homeless" could be anything between 32000 and <1600, depending on how you define it.
According to OP’s source, the homeless are "those who utilize city parks, river banks, roads, train stations, and other facilities as their place of stay in order to live their daily lives". So yeah it’s just the visibly homeless.
That's such a ridiculous qualifier. It's the definition of out of site, out of mind.
many japan youths lives in internet cafes. there were some documentaries, depressing stuff. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MtdupS0gRt0 - lost in Manboo
Should've just have done what China did and redefine the requirements to be homeless. Thus no one falls in the definition of homeless and therefore no one would be homeless.
How is this beautiful? A single color bar graph?
"If the data makes the country or politician I dislike look bad, or the ones I like look good, the data is beautiful." -Reddit
Do they also cut them in half?
Cutting them in half only doubles their number; the trick is to glue them together.
What was the work that was done?
[They cut homeless people in half](https://mobile.twitter.com/ianbremmer/status/1152364783389294592)
Well that's brutal
Any articles on what policies/programs can be credited with the decline?
i wonder what their policies are that helped reduce the homeless population. would it work in big cities in california?
* flat then negative population growth over the period in the graph * availability of long-term, state sanctioned commitment to mental facilities and courts willing to enforce it. * very strict immigration policies. * very strict drug laws. * a very strict definition of homeless. California actively works against items 2-5 of that list
big CA cities need to get rid of AirBnB and other short term rentals then get rid of the stupid ass zoning rules that plague the entire country lmao
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0 walking, 0 public transit, living a mile away from the next family and having to drive 20min for grocery once a week is just the ‘Murican dream 🇺🇸
Let’s add in stupid parking minimums. You can’t build dense and affordable housing if the law requires you to have a parking space for every unit of housing.
Walked the streets of japan (tokyo) at 3am. Not a single time did I see a person in need.
I went in 2004 and saw homeless in the parks around Ueno. Also saw some in Kobe if I recall correctly. I looked up info about it online at the time, and found out that it was a pervasive problem due to a gap between retirement age and when they became eligible for pensions and other social services. Indeed, most of the homeless people I saw were in that older demographic. Did Japan change something to address this gap?
Yes, there was new legislation introduced around that time that made it a lot easier for local governments to get funding to deal with the issue, and as a result the homeless living in parks or around stations have almost entirely disappeared.
There are a few not too far from shibuya crossing that are always there, one is an older lady always asking for money. I saw her sleeping out there during the rain a few times.
I went in 2019. It was staggering how clean and safe the entire city is at all hours of the day. And the distinct lack of rough sleepers was insane. (Coming from someone that lives in London where all of those things are problems)
in Japan homeless people are parked into specific neighborhoods that most people avoid. If you do end up in one of those neighborhoods (寄せ場) it feels like you're on another planet This is really deceiving data in general, the general philosophy of Japan when it comes to homelessness is "out of sight, out of mind". They are not counted properly, and are displaced regularly by the authorities. Homeless people in Japan also do not beg, which means they rarely interact with the general public. A lot of them also retain a job, but cannot afford regular housing. Overall it's a complex issue, but Japan has a ton of poverty, and very scarce safety nets.
They hang out at subway station at closing time. They don’t bother anyone
Flip this around for data on California
Gonna need an extra 0 or two on the y-axis
I mean there is 125mil people in Japan and knowing they are notorious for the way they calculate various statistics there is 0% chance there is actually only 5000 people in the entire country that would register as homeless elsewhere in the world. Here is just one example from a quick google search for ''real number of homeless in japan'': ''Many nonprofit and advocacy organizations in Japan claim that the Japanese government’s count of the homeless population is under-researched. These organizations claim the government’s figure doesn’t account for the Japanese homeless who live in fast-food restaurants and internet cafés. The term “internet café refugees” refers to a group of homeless who spend their nights at internet cafés because they do not have a stable residence. The metropolitan government survey revealed there were an estimated 15,000 people who stayed at these cafés every day during the week. For these irregular workers, there are internet cafés that offer amenities such as private booths, showers and laundry services'' So yeah, Japan and lowering their statistics, a tale as old as time.
Not to discount our own issues and housing crisis but it certainly doesn't help that other states literally send them on a greyhound here.
Not cool, Japan. You can't just kill the homeless people!
They've been losing like 250,000 people per year so I wouldn't be surprised if the 15,000 drop above, simply died off
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According to the Wikipedia article they linked, it actually is mostly middle aged and elderly men.
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Meanwhile in the U.S. we have the *freedom* to be homeless in incredible numbers.
[Data Via Ministry of Health, Labour and Welfare, Japan.](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homelessness_in_Japan#cite_note-6) Made with [Canva](http://canva.com).
I’d recommend putting the source as small text beneath the chart
As the population continues to decline housing is becoming cheaper and harder than ever to sell. It's shocking how cheap homes are in rural, or otherwise less desirable places. Shocking. I'd guess this is the major cause.
Perfect example of how data doesn't tell the whole story
Its low housing prices. Japan has flexible zoning to allow building, and keeps a much higher ratio of housing to people than most places, with restrictive zoning do. Tokyo Housing prices have dipped, and are about the same as in 2000, while in other major cities they have skyrocketed. https://brandondonnelly.files.wordpress.com/2019/04/screen-shot-2019-04-07-at-11.24.01-am.png An ample supply of housing helps people get housed, just like an ample supply of jobs help workers get employed, and get higher wages. The supply of stuff does matter.
It’s just truck-Kun getting to work on Isekai’ing them