Poverty in Japan

I have already started a topic, The Working Poor in Japan. HERE

Here is an article from the Wash Post published in 1996, reporting on the retired poor in Japan. HERE

TOKYO -- What is left after Gosuke Kakizaki's 73 years of life as a magazine typesetter turned failed businessman turned penniless retiree is contained in two small rooms of a gray public housing complex far from the glittery core of this city. A white teakettle, a few stacks of books and a little TV set remain, as do mounted photographs from the hiking trips he stopped taking about three years ago.
That was when he was hit by the first of a series of deep cuts in welfare assistance for destitute seniors, a group whose swelling numbers are aging the face of poverty in Japan. For Kakizaki -- an "elderly orphan" living alone and entirely dependent on the state -- the reductions have slashed the government checks he must get by on in hyper-pricey Tokyo from $826 to $625 a month.
"I can't afford transportation, film for my camera or the photo-developing fees for such trips anymore," said the soft-spoken Kakizaki, who is long divorced and has only sporadic contact with his two adult children. "The photos are all I have left. I can barely afford to feed myself now."
As the world's most rapidly graying nation struggles to cope with the exploding costs of its aging population, it is cutting back its famed safety net of universal health care, generous pensions and welfare benefits for seniors of all social classes. But those already living on the margins are being hit the hardest.
Over the past decade, the number of indigent seniors nationwide skyrocketed by 183 percent to about half a million people, Welfare Ministry statistics show. Most of them are victims of the protracted recession that Japan endured in the '90s, and many have been abandoned by children bucking the Japanese tradition of living with one's elderly parents.