There has been much handwringing of late with regard to the childhood poverty rate in Japan. This is something I would like to address in future posts, but for now I want to share a graph I found which shows childhood poverty rates by prefecture.

Overall, Japan has a childhood poverty rate of 13.8%, considerably less than America's rate of 21%. But looking at individual prefectures, we find that the poverty rate of Okinawa, the nation's worst, is 37.5%. Ōsaka has the second highest childhood poverty rate at over 20%. Kagoshima is third and my prefecture of Fukuoka is fourth with just under 20%, meaning one in five kids is living in poverty. Sobering statistics, to say the least.

For some albeit dated perspective, here is how Japan compares to other countries in the OECD. On average, 13.4% of children in OECD countries live in “relative income poverty”, which is defined “as the percentage of children (0-17 year-olds) with an equivalised household disposable income (i.e. an income after taxes and transfers adjusted for household size) below the poverty threshold. The poverty threshold is set here at 50% of the median disposable income in each country.”