Poverty in Japan has been concealed in the chorus of admiration recognizing the nation becoming the world’s second largest economy in the latter half of the twentieth century. This collection of papers by ten specialists in poverty research unravels the ways in which the poor have been socially excluded in contemporary Japan and how this reality derives from the structure of inequality in social resources, life chances and power relations. These studies scrutinize the extent to which Japan’s welfare policies have disseminated and consolidated particular types of understanding about poverty. The book reveals their contradictions by highlighting the lives of the homeless, new-comer foreign migrants, residents in poor housing and many other socially excluded groups.