If poverty could speak – poverty as Japan today experiences it – it might say something like this: “Since her divorce mother has worked very hard to raise me. But prices are rising and there’s never enough food on the table. So I go to school without breakfast.
On days when there’s no school I skip lunch too. Showers are once a week. My hair is filthy.
I never touch it. If I do it’ll show. Now that I’ve started junior high school I want to go on school trips and take part in after-school activities, but it all costs money; it’s very hard.
” (1st year junior high school) Or this: “There are four of us: me, my mother and my grandparents. Mother has a disability and hasn’t been able to work since I was 11. She was in hospital for a long time, and I was nurse and caregiver.
From junior high school on I hardly went to school at all. I worked part-time. I barely managed to graduate from senior high school.
I chose nursing school partly to learn to be a nurse to my mother, partly because tuition isn’t so expensive. Our main income is mother’s disability benefits plus my grandparents’ pensions. There were times when I was working four part-time jobs at once.
Tuition at nursing school may be cheap but the uniform isn’t and neither are the textbooks. My friends at school think I’m not really interested in my studies, but the truth is I have no time to study. It’s wearing me down.
” (2nd year nursing school) Poverty persists – reduced in scope and blu.