No rosy ending in sight in real-life poverty tale

On Monday's Labor Thanksgiving Day, a soup run was held for homeless people in Tokyo's Shiba Park. I heard the event was organized by people to repay the kindness they received at last winter's Toshikoshi Haken Mura, a tent village set up in Tokyo's Hibiya Park over the New Year holidays as a temporary shelter for people who had lost their homes and jobs. This time, a man who had lined up for a meal in Hibiya was on the other side to hand out bowls of rice and miso soup with pork and vegetables.

Tales of "revisits" are not uncommon among such touching stories. I wonder if readers remember the story "Ippai no Kakesoba" (A bowl of plain noodles) that was all the rage 20 years ago? Every New Year's Eve, an impoverished mother and her two sons would visit a noodle shop to share a bowl of plain noodles. (It is a Japanese custom to eat toshikoshi soba, literally year-crossing noodles, on New Year's Eve.) The couple who ran the restaurant secretly supported them by giving them generous helpings. But one year, the threesome stopped making their annual visits to the restaurant, much to the anxiety of neighbors. On New Year's Eve many years later, the sons, who grew up to become a doctor and a banker, went to the restaurant with their aging mother.

The tale was a well-written tear-jerker. Rumors that it was a true story made it all the more moving at a time when the asset-inflated economy of the late 1980s to the early 1990s was reaching its peak. Although some criticized the heavy-handed and sentimental style, the public was evidently hungry for a story about the sort of human kindness that money cannot buy.

The dutiful sons ordered three bowls of plain noodles, one each for their mother and themselves. They described the meal as the greatest luxury of their lives. As I reread the story to the end, I felt a strange sense of incongruity. Perhaps it was because the honorable poverty romantically portrayed in the tale seemed artificial compared to genuine destitution.

In Japan, one in six people is said to be poor. As far as single-parent households like the one in the noodle story are concerned, more than half are said to live below the poverty line. This is the worst figure among industrialized countries. The situation is especially serious for fatherless families, where job security is poor. There must be whole families who want to line up for free meals.

The sight of socially vulnerable people helping each other is heart-rending. But it is also a reflection of the lack of public policy to support them. Since the government has officially recognized that the economy has entered a state of deflation, it should give priority to policies to bolster household budgets and jobs so as to prevent consumption from contracting further. Real poverty cannot be ended by moving stories.

--The Asahi Shimbun, Nov. 24(IHT/Asahi: November 25,2009)