Next Steps

“From food banks to fūdobanku”

In Japan, the problem of food insecurity started to be more and more visible from the mid-2000s, and partly replaced the idea of an equal society where virtually all citizens belong to the middle-class. 

Rather than a problem confined to the homeless, food insecurity slowly came to be seen as an issue affecting larger strata of the population. In fact, since the 1980s the poverty rate has risen steadily, increasing by four percentage points from 1985 to 2015, and making Japan one of the top five among the OECD countries. 

According to most recent data, around 16% of the population lives below the poverty line, and more than 6% unable to buy food because of financial reasons at least sometimes over the past year. 

And as poverty increased, so has the number of Japanese FSPs. 

Since the opening of “Second Harvest Japan” in 2000, several other FSPs have started operating throughout the country, and today around 50 nongovernmental organizations are known to provide food aid to those in need.

In Japan, a growing body of literature is illustrating the functioning of food support organizations through case studies that explore the tensions between these programs and the failure of public safety nets, as well as the transformation of food value from waste to surplus via food banks work.

 Still lacking however is research on i) the existing types of FSPs, their differences, and their mutual relation of dependence, competition and cooperation ii) their reaction to the COVID19 crisis iii) the food offer provided to migrants and on migrants’ access to their offer, and on iv) the differences and similarities between the Japanese field of food support provision with that of other countries.

 Seeking to fill this gap, this new project starting in November 2019 thanks to a JSPS fellowship will bridge the data gathered in Greater Manchester with comparable data collected using semi-structured interviews with food support providers’ directors and stakeholders active in in Kyoto and Kyushu.