Homeless people have increased and become visible socially in Japan since the mid 1990s. There has also been a corresponding increase in sociological studies of homelessness. These studies have sought to analyse the unique characteristics of homeless people: rough sleepers, ex-day-labourers, single men, the elderly and so on. The life conditions of homeless people have also been analysed: how they get jobs, foods and shelter; how they make networks among themselves; how they resist violence from the mainstream citizenry and so on. However, in order to understand the observed situations of homeless people correctly, the economic, institutional and structural backgrounds of homelessness in Japan must be analysed on a macro and historical level. To date, no such study has been undertaken. This paper seeks to fill that gap. It analyses the processes through which homelessness has appeared in Japan. It has three specific aims. The first is to analyse the economic background of homelessness by focusing on two phenomena brought by globalisation to Japan: deyosebisation, which means the gradual disappearance of day-labourers from yoseba (the day-labour market); and the disemployment of casually employed unskilled workers in the general labour market. The second is to analyse the institutional background of homelessness to regulate the homeless population, especially by focusing on social welfare. The third is to analyse the structural background of homelessness to regulate the homeless population by focusing on two affiliate groups: company and family/relatives. The research field of this paper is Metropolitan Osaka in the 1990s.
After the Meiji Restoration in 1868, Japan rapidly industrialized, greatly raising its level of economic productivity. However, the peasants were kept in a state of hunger under a semifeudal agricultural system. How should this semi-feudality be understood? About this question arose a debate among Japanese Marxists in prewar Japan: the Debate on Japanese Capitalism. This article examines the methodologies of three analysists of Japanese capitalism focusing on the level of abstraction of the analysis of capitalism, whose ideas were derived from Hegel’s Logic and Marx’s methodology of downward analysis and upward development: Moritarō Yamada of Kōzaha, Itsurō Sakisaka of Rōnōha, and Kōzō Uno, who distanced himself from both sides. Uno criticized Yamada and Sakisaka for directly analyzing a particular Japanese capitalism with a highly general theory such as Capital, and proposed the Three-Stage Theory: the Pure Theory, which is based on the assumption of a pure capitalism, such as Marx’s Capital; the Stage Theory, which clarifies the historical developmental stage of capitalism, such as Lenin’s Imperialism (1917); and the Empirical Analysis, which analyzes capitalism in each country at a given time. However, Uno’s main concern was to analyze Japanese capitalism in the Stage Theory, doing little to further advance it in the Empirical Analysis. Therefore, this article divided the Empirical Analysis into two levels of abstraction: the domain of theoretical construction of Japanese Capitalism, such as Lenin’s Development of Capitalism in Russia (1899), and of data analysis of specific conditions of Japanese capitalism, such as Engels’ The Condition of the Working Class in England (1844), and thus proposed the Four-Stage Theory. It is a hypothesis for complementing Uno’s Three-Stage Theory, which should be further developed by data. Finally, such methodological consideration for analyzing capitalism is applicable to non-Japanese capitalist societies.
This paper consists of six parts. First, it presents the main points in relation to the traditional binomial classification of urban formality and informality based on the overurbanization theory. Second, it presents the main points in relation to the new informality theory developed by Ananya Roy and others, who criticize the traditional informality theory by emphasizing the political process by which the state constructs the binomial classification of urban formality and informality. Third, this paper reinforces Roy s informality theory by clarifying the role of state sovereignty in constructing the binomial classification of urban formality and informality. Fourth, it introduces the concepts of exceptional situation and Homo Sacer developed by Giorgio Agamben to clarify the position of state sovereignty in Roy s informality theory. Fifth, it proposes a conceptual framework for analyzing the political process of constructing formality and informality more clearly by
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