Hidden are the armies of casual labour, the transient office workers, the insecure workforce, predatory capital that chews up and spits out trade unions. This is a city and a society with between 280,000 and 700,000 hikikomori, where the old fear facing death alone, and where familial support networks are small; the number of children per couple has sunk to 1.39. Another big problem in Tokyo is the water supply which is already struggle to keep up to the demand if the population continues to grow at the same rate.

News. Child poverty in working, single-parent households stood at 50 percent, according to a 2014 TokyoWeekender article.

After the Fukushima nuclear disaster of March 2011, there have been many job losses for middle-aged workers.

“There are hypotheses that argue that this is specific to Japan,” says Dr Teo. There are lots of problems in Tokyo due to it’s massive population of over 13 million people and what come with that it a lot negative impact to the beautiful city of Tokyo. In some areas of Tokyo, there are as many as 20,000 people living in one square kilometre, which may start to cause problems in the foreseeable future. Although the demand for water is currently stable, it may quickly rise in the next few decades if population and/or population density rises by much more. Groups of lonely young people meet online, organising group suicides in a forest at the foot of Mount Fuji known as the ‘Sea of Trees’.

The main problem is the population density.

When people think of Tokyo, “poor” is a thought that seldom ever comes to mind. More than 1.23 million single mother households exist that earn only 40 percent of the average household income. The heat island effect is when the city gets heated up due to everyday activities. Due to the stagnant economy, the number of “freeters” is on a rise. Tokyo is dealing with major problems, but still has the determination to fix their problem. Laing in post-war Glasgow.

Yet when the story of the emaciated and hypothermia-struck bodies of an elderly man, his wife and 39-year-old son were found in their home after weeks of no one noticing, one cannot help but question the state of the one in six Japanese citizens living under the poverty line.

This sense of pervasive urban atomisation is not confined to the elderly. Of the total population, 15.7 percent of Japanese people live in poverty, a percentage greater than countries with less economic resources. Cruel new forms of fraud have emerged in the metropolis, taking advantage of the lonely, affluent old. Solitude and suicide are certainly profound problems in Tokyo. The Yankees Have Discovered the Transformative Power of Human Touch. Buses in suburban Tokyo now issue regular pre-recorded warnings to their passengers, suggesting that passwords be shared with family members to prevent the fraud.

Sources: Behind the Grids, Japan Sociology, Tokyo Weekender, Library of Congress, The Economist I don’t fear kodokushi personally, but it’s a death that’s possible for me.”.

The country’s overall child poverty rate has also hit a record high of 16.3 percent, prompting questions as to whether the country is trying to fix these issues.

More often forgotten are the forms of social exclusion, stifling patriarchal control, communal bloodletting and the oppressive, overbearing ‘carbon monoxide’ atmospheres described by R.D. This is because fact that Tokyo has one of the highest average population densities in the world, Which continues to grow day by day and put pressure on the already struggling public housing.

Tokyo has lost many of its population because of catastrophic floods, high tides and large earthquakes.

The Abe administration is working on poverty alleviation methods, but not enough attention is paid to child poverty.

Rather than defining themselves by who they were as individuals, Young and Willmott saw a shift towards forms of identity predicated on material consumption and ownership of commodities. As a result of that this leaves not much options for housing available in Tokyo in fact it is currently so crowded that there are some part of the city that have more than 20 000 people per square, . Walking in the streets of the capital, you do not see people begging for money; the homeless are all hiding amongst the shadows.

In 1977, as a bullet train rolled into a Tokyo station, conductors found a 70 year-old man dead in his seat. Poverty is a topic that is emerging from the shadows, and the Japanese government is beginning to acknowledge and address its presence. IOC gets official look at simplification for Tokyo Olympics. Create your own unique website with customizable templates. In Tokyo no one lives in slums but the housing is crowded that a lot of people a forced to live in multi-, public housing with other hundreds to thousands people. The sense of alienation engendered by the increasing regulation and formalisation of urban society was again picked up by British sociologists Michael Young and Peter Willmott in their 1957 book Family and Kinship in East London. Calls for removing nuclear plants completely swarmed the country due to the fact that 20 percent of the world’s earthquakes occur in Japan; danger of a repeat is high. But jumping from job to job in modern Japan is too difficult to properly survive on. In the absence of immediate social networks and friendship groups Tokyo’s isolated youth often turn to the impersonal anonymity of the online world. In 1998, following economic collapse in Japan, the number of suicides increased by a third in a single year. As a result, Tokyo’s elderly are dying alone in greater and greater numbers. “Dying alone is a persistent problem, and it won’t stop getting worse,” he says. There is often an element of sensationalism to Tokyo’s apparent suicide problem.

In his book Population Ten Billion, Danny Dorling, Professor of Geography at the University of Oxford, describes solitary living as part of a long process of urbanisation. The maelstrom of informal dealings, kinship links and general chaos of Kinshasa, Manila or Lagos is swept away on a tide of organised, homogenised industrial capitalism, as rickety slums are replaced with sprawling suburban developments.