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This paper investigates the labor-controlling orientation of the Japanese developmental state and its consequences today. Developmental state studies has given us a robust epistemological grid whereby we can make non-Western state formation intelligible. Yet, mainstream authors have tended to treat the working class as a mere appendage to state– business relations, relegating labor politics at the analysis of state– society relations. By using democratic Japan—a prime example of this sort of obfuscation—in combination with Marxian state theory, this paper outlines the difficulties, addresses them, and extends the scope of developmental state studies to labor. After identifying main tenets of the literature, the author constructs a theory of labor control as a stabilizer of relative state autonomy. The author applies this to Japanese labor movements since 1945 and interprets events and processes of labor oppression/regulation through which Japanese capitalism subsumed the working class under the aegis of the developmental state. Labor control, emerging out of an “exceptional state” (Poulantzas, 1974), evolved into a refined socio-relational system that insulated developmental goals from labor movements. This Japanese trajectory keenly mobilized big business and elite labor, which transformed labor control into a bilateral and then a tripartite league in defense of industrial policy and its deskilling/reskilling intervention. By the 1970s, this achieved the famous docility of Japanese labor. The historically constructed character of docile labor force was exploited once again when Japan made a neoliberal turn in its post-development phase.

Urban social movements (USMs) and regulation have co-evolved in Japan to deal with homelessness, spatializaing their politics on the national and subnational scales. The author first theorizes these USM–regulation relationships as scale-oriented dialectics between two opposing forces—“commoning and othering”—both of which in my view are always internalized in today's “rebel cities” (Harvey 2012, Rebel Cities, Verso). Then, he analyzes two trajectories of USMs that attempted commoning—ie radical opening up of public goods/spaces within “zones of weakness” (Lefebvre 2009a)—against policing and workfare disciplines. The author detects “rescaling” dialectics in the case of Yokohama and “nationalizing” dialectics in the case of Tokyo. Lastly, through exploring and refreshing Engels's notion of the (petit-)bourgeois utopia, the author concludes that our commoning projects and imaginaries are constrained by capitalist urban form that spatially others the homeless; but truly revolutionary moments of commoning emerge whenever people—even temporarily—conquer the fetishism of the public/private binary embedded in this urban form.

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 late 1970s, Atlantic Fordism has seen rising homelessness and ghettoization as the 'new urban poverty' ( NUP) ( Mingione, 1996). Despite some similarities, the NUP in Japan has a unique rhythm and spatial pattern. In order to explore Japanese NUP, this article develops an interpretation of Japan's strategies to regulate poverty and homelessness during the last 50 years, paying particular attention to the spatial consequences of such strategies within major Japanese cities. First, I theorize long-term economic growth patterns as a basic parameter of poverty and homelessness regulation and present a periodization of Japanese trends since the 1950s. Second, I analyze poverty in Japan 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 Japan. I argue that, through a dialectic between national/local rule-setting and homelessness, the Japanese 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, Japan'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.

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.