Due to the chorus of admiration that recognizes Japan having become the world"s second largest economy in the latter half of the 20th century, the awareness of poverty in Japan has been concealed. This collection of papers by twelve specialists in poverty research unravels the ways in which the poor have been socially excluded in contemporary Japan. The book examines how this reality derives from the structure of inequality in social resources, life chances, and power relations. It scrutinizes the extent to which Japan"s social welfare policies have disseminated and consolidated particular types of understanding about poverty. It reveals their contradictions by highlighting the lives of the homeless, new-comer foreign workers, residents in poor housing areas, and many other socially excluded groups.