This work examines the daily lives of Japan’s very poor—the kasō shakai or underclass—during the last half of the Meiji era (1868-1912). Focusing on urban slums (hinminkutsu), it attempts to understand how poor people themselves experienced life. After examining the dominant popular views of hinmin or poor people in this era as a baseline, the author looks at what brought masses of hinmin to the cities, where they lived, and what work they did: everything from pulling rickshaws to making textiles, from carrying night soil to providing sex. It looks too at the daily challenges of stretching bud ... More

This work examines the daily lives of Japan’s very poor—the kasō shakai or underclass—during the last half of the Meiji era (1868-1912). Focusing on urban slums (hinminkutsu), it attempts to understand how poor people themselves experienced life. After examining the dominant popular views of hinmin or poor people in this era as a baseline, the author looks at what brought masses of hinmin to the cities, where they lived, and what work they did: everything from pulling rickshaws to making textiles, from carrying night soil to providing sex. It looks too at the daily challenges of stretching budgets, grappling with educational issues for children, and preparing meals. One chapter concentrates on the major problems, such as illness and disasters, that made the poverty-stricken life especially difficult, while another examines the endless ways in which the very poor acted as agents, filling life not just with hope but with activism and celebration in the here and now. Final, comparative chapters take up the nature of rural poverty and the lives of poor Japanese immigrants in Hawai’i’s sugar plantations as a way of understanding what was unique about urban poverty. The work contends that despite massive difficulties, the hinmin attacked life as intelligent agents, experiencing a range of life experiences similar to those that typified the more affluent classes.