Times and Spaces of Homeless Regulation in J apan, 1950s–2000s: Historical and Contemporary Analysis

Since the late 1970s, A tlantic F ordism has seen rising homelessness and ghettoization as the ‘new urban poverty’ ( NUP ) ( M ingione, 1996). Despite some similarities, the NUP in J apan has a unique rhythm and spatial pattern. In order to explore J apanese NUP , this article develops an interpretation of J apan's strategies to regulate poverty and homelessness during the last 50 years, paying particular attention to the spatial consequences of such strategies within major J apanese cities. First, I theorize long‐term economic growth patterns as a basic parameter of poverty and homelessness regulation and present a periodization of J apanese trends since the 1950s. Second, I analyze poverty in J apan and the transformation of national strategies of spatial regulation in the 1990s, when homelessness grew. Third, I examine the multi‐scalar processes through which new regulatory spaces of homelessness were produced in the 1990s and 2000s, when failures of post‐bubble crisis management ballooned in J apan. I argue that, through a dialectic between national/local rule‐setting and homelessness, the J apanese state fragmented the dominant scale of poverty regulation, rescaled the site of homeless regulation and contained homelessness in relatively autonomized cities. I conclude that, from the 1990s until the late 2000s, J apan's homelessness and its contradictions tended to be transferred to the spheres of urban workfare and urban policing, which I call new regulatory spaces of homelessness, that lie around the fringes of national social rights.