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Paper short abstract:

Today, the Japanese show the most negative attitude in the world toward a governmental safety net for those who cannot afford decent housing. This paper examines the historical background of this “cold” nation attitude from a long-term perspective.

Paper long abstract:

Today, the Japanese show the most negative attitude in the world toward a governmental safety net for those who cannot afford decent housing. In order to investigate the historical background of this “cold” nation attitude from a long-term perspective, this paper examines what the general standard of housing was in early modern rural Japan, how it was secured by the autonomous village and the authorities, and whether housing security level changed after Japan turned from a decentralized lordship state to a centralized modern state from 1870s onwards.

In Tokugawa Japan, it seems that the median size of a peasant house lay in about 15 tsubo (48.6 square meters) for a family of six, and it did not change so drastically until 1940s. This general standard of living was not secured even when people lost their houses by disasters: the authorities did not assist the victims in rebuilding their houses and left the reconstruction of housing basically to the market; village communities provided merely a little hut which had only 6 tsubo (19.44 square meters), far from the general standard 15 tsubo. In early modern Japan, no housing policy existed, security means were extremely limited, and maintaining and reconstructing one’s house heavily depended on the market and people’s self-help.

This tendency toward low level of housing security lasted even after a centralized modern state emerged in 1870s. As one social survey official of Osaka City sighed in 1927 that “the Japanese traditionally don’t care about housing problems,” housing security and policy attracted few people in Japan not only in early modern era but also until the first half of twentieth century.

After World War II, Japan finally enacted housing laws in 1950s to 1960s that provided decent housing, not a hut, for low-income families and the “outcast” minorities. However, unlike Europe and USA, Japan has not yet introduced a universal rental subsidy program, and in 2006 the government insisted that “the human right to adequate housing has not yet achieved a national consensus.” Even in twenty-first century, it seems that “the Japanese traditionally don’t care about housing problems.”