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This chapter examines local/national trajectories of social movements for homeless people, arguing that ‘pro-homeless’ activism has fundamentally improved the Japanese welfare state. State-led high growth historically allocated resources favouring capitalist expansion, not people’s welfare. This tendency hit the homeless the most. In turn, this has given pro-homeless activism significant potentials and capacities. Firstly, pro-homeless activism has dominantly taken local forms, improving welfare provision at welfare offices. Secondly, in the late 2000s, activism won achievements at the national level, by reframing homelessness as a national problem. Thirdly, the wholesale inclusion of the homeless/poor has evoked their re-marginalization. Today, neoliberal/neoconservative forces are advancing anti-poor politics to revoke movements’ prior successes, paradoxically testifying to the power of pro-homeless activism in developing the welfare state.

After the 1970s the new urban poverty (NUP) ballooned in Japan and the US, and it evoked policy responses that produced new, rescaled regulatory spaces to contain the poor on the fringe of social rights and the capital circuit. The paper illuminates this process through the comparison of Japanese and US trajectories, both of which, evolving through economic crises, have established unique pathways. The author first constructs a theoretical framework based on Marxian, Polanyian, and Lefebvrean traditions. Then, he compares national-scale poverty regulation in Japan and the US from the 1950s through the 2000s. Lastly, the author examines how the countries’ regulation of a major aspect of the NUP—homelessness—intensified multiscalar rescaling processes. The article concludes that regulation of the NUP represents a significant instance of uneven spatial development of capitalism mediated by the state that requires synthetic research. Keywords: rescaling, homelessness, ghettoization, the new urban poverty, regulation theory, the capital circuit, uneven spatial development

Since the mid-1990s, Japanese society has experienced a sharp increase in the number of street homeless people. Most them are relatively old. At present, more than fifty percent of the street homeless are over fifty years old. However, in addition to the older people, we are beginning to see younger street homeless people. In this paper, I define younger as below thirty-five years. The younger people still comprise a small proportion of the street homeless people; that is, they are fewer than ten percent of the entire street homeless population. However, they should not be neglected merely because they have until now constituted a negligible-sized group. Younger street homeless people are a completely new phenomenon for the Japanese. They might be the heralds of the changing structure of Japanese society.This paper uses the life histories of younger street homeless people to describe and analyze two distinctive processes in their experiences; these processes are the “process of becoming” and the “process of remaining.” Usually, in their endeavor to explain both processes, scholars advance claims that are strongly economic. The scholars may be correct as long as their focus is on older people. However, the issue is slightly different in the case of younger people. Younger people often tell us that their job losses have been spontaneous. While such answers should certainly not be examined superficially, it is also important that the experiences and pathways of younger people be analyzed by including variables other than economic ones; these variables are the state of the social world and that of the inner world.Lastly, this paper reconsiders the experiences of younger street homeless people from a structural perspective. The combination of the theory of individualization and the theory of the urban underclass enables it to do so.