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In 2007, a former taxi driver in his fifties died from starvation in the city of Kitakyushu, Japan, leaving the note "want to eat a rice ball" in his diary. He had kidney disease and could not work but had been denied welfare assistance. In 2013 in Osaka, a mother and her three-year-old son were found dead; the mother had divorced an abusive husband and tried to work in bars to make ends meet. She left a note saying, "I am so sorry I could not feed you much for the last time" (Konno 2013). These cases of death from hunger might be extreme, but more hidden cases of hunger and malnutrition have been reported as well. The Japan Broadcasting Corporation (NHK) featured the experiences of 200 families receiving food assistance from a food bank in 2014. The NHK survey found they had less than 400 yen per day for food, making it very difficult for them to provide nutritious meals for their children (Japan Broadcasting Corporation 2014). The newspaper Asahi Shinbun similarly reported in 2015 on the problem of families who did not have enough to eat every day. It quoted a single mother of two who said that they survived by eating very little, sometimes trying to fill their stomachs by eating tissue paper seasoned with salt. The mother had divorced her abusive husband and had a temporary job at a factory, although depression sometimes prevented her from working (Asahi Shinbun 2015).
In addition to other manifestations of precarity, such as kodokushi (lonely death), social withdrawal, and suicide, food insecurity is increasingly visible in contemporary Japan. The United Nations defines food security as having physical and economic access to sufficient, safe, and nutritious food (Mechlem 2004). Unlike the United States, Japan does not collect periodic national data on household food insecurity. But surveys are beginning to show that 15-17 percent of its population can be considered food insecure (National Institute of Population and Social Security Research 2007, 2012).
The conditions of food security in Japan are not yet fully understood, and there is an urgent need to shed light on who suffers from food insecurity and what strategies they use to cope. This article focuses on a slightly different aspect of the...
