Down and Out in Late Meiji Japan by James L. Huffman (review)

This book provides a meticulously researched account of the Japanese poor in the closing three decades of the Meiji period (1868–1912). James Huffman draws upon an extensive array of sources including reportage, fictional representations, government statistics, and previous studies to paint a vivid portrait of what life must have felt like for people on the extreme socioeconomic margins of a rapidly transforming Japan. Perhaps as never before in Anglophone research on Japan, the study gives an intimate glimpse into the labor practices, life circumstances, challenges, and triumphs of those who populated the country's modern slums (hinminkutsu) and, to a lesser extent, its impoverished rural communities and emigrant labor force. It makes the case for the fundamental humanity of a people often demonized by their contemporaries despite the undeniable contribution they made to Japan's modern economic development.

Down and Out in Late Meiji Japan is a unique ode to Japan's poor, one that is so resolutely sympathetic that at times it perhaps even borders on a fetishization of the people it writes about. It is, ultimately, an important work and a necessary counter-weight to much that has been written on Japan's modern economic transformation. The book redirects our attention to the human face of economic modernization and points to important areas of scholarship that have been neglected in a historiography often understandably obsessed with questions of nation, state, and empire building; the comparative success of Japanese economic growth; and the degree to which Japan actually edged toward democracy in the post-Restoration period.

The author adopts an unapologetically supportive stance toward his subjects: he aims to study history from the perspective of the poor—or in short, to see it "their way" (p. 19). He cites several reasons for this, including a desire to better understand the agency and subjectivity of the poor and, perhaps most importantly, the fact that he himself grew up in a form of poverty and finds strong resonance in the lives of the people he studies (pp. 21–24). Huffman strives at every turn to portray the residents of the hinminkutsu as "self-conscious agents" (p. 157) who did much more than mechanically react to their life circumstances. His main focus throughout is on the "experiences of being poor" (p. 220) across urban, rural, and migrant spaces, and he attempts to understand the common features of poverty for those who lived it most directly, as well as the core challenges, motivations, and hopes that these people knew. Reconstructing the lived experience of poverty, he evokes for the reader the sights, sounds, smells, and rhythms of slum and village life. What results is an incredibly rich descriptive study, full of social texture and driven by uncomplicated and commanding prose.

Chapter 1 sets out to help the reader understand the nature of modern Japanese slums, the context for their emergence and transformation, and the various pathways by which people came to lead an impoverished life in Meiji Japan. Chapters 2 and 3 examine the labor practices of slum residents, with the former focusing on people who made and built things (including match makers and other factory workers as well as day laborers, who worked mainly in construction) and the latter on those who transported and served others (such as rickshaw pullers, acupuncturists and other body healers, and sex workers). Chapter 4 details how the urban poor (hinmin)—predominantly those with families—made a living in the slums and how they individually and collectively handled financial shortfalls and stretched their budgets, all the while managing to live life to the full despite their disadvantages. Chapter 5 explores slum residents' responses to adversity, whether in the form of natural disasters, disease, debt, or delinquency. Chapter 6 further examines the agency of slum dwellers, highlighting their various attempts to protest and right injustices, counter oppressive policies, improve their circumstances, and lead fuller lives. Chapter 7 turns to rural poverty, offering comparative...