Henry Mantel

Japan has about the same poverty rate as the United States. The entire country, 123 million people, has fewer people living on the street than the city of San Diego. Poor families in Tokyo live scattered across the whole city, mixed in with everyone else, and a couple of pretty boring government policies make that happen. One of them has to do with where your kid goes to school. Housing is the easier one to see. Slums show up when the only cheap rent in a city sits in one part of town. Tokyo, with about 14 million people, broke ground on 129,571 new homes in its 2024 fiscal year. California has 39 million people and permitted about 102,000 in all of 2025. In Japan you can put up an apartment building almost anywhere without going through years of hearings, and buildings lose value over time like a used car, so owners knock them down and rebuild one lot at a time. You end up with a cheap old two-story apartment sitting near a brand new tower in pretty much every neighborhood, and the cheap rent ends up everywhere. The school one is the part most Americans have never heard about. Here, a lot of public school money comes from local property taxes. So if you want your kid in a good school, you pay up for a house in a good district. Families who can't afford that end up in the same few neighborhoods, their schools get less money, and after a couple of generations you have whole zip codes where almost everyone is struggling. Japan takes most of the money out of that decision. For public elementary and middle schools, the prefecture pays two-thirds of teacher salaries and the national government covers the rest, so a teacher in a poor area gets paid off the same scale as one in a rich area. Teachers also get moved to a new school every three to six years. The best teacher in Tokyo could be at the poorest school in the city this year. If the school down the street is about as good as the one across town, there's not much reason to pay extra to move. Tokyo had shantytowns within living memory, too. The March 1945 firebombing left around a million people homeless, and families lived in shacks and old air raid shelters. The country needed something like 4.2 million new homes, spent the next twenty years building its way out, and honestly never stopped.