Down and out in upscale Japan

A newly released government survey found that Tokyo's homeless population has reached an all-time low. But critics call the survey incomplete and misleading, and yet another effort to look past a population that is contending with growing economic disparity, Homelessness was a problem that was largely unknown until the economic bubble burst in the early 1990s and unemployment rose sharply. A number of Japanese cultural factors are at play, including a reluctance among many Japanese employers to hire unmarried or elderly men. Consequently, elderly men make up a large proportion of Japan's homeless population,