Oceanshaft

There was an article in today's Straits Times about the welfare system in Japan, focusing on a man who starved to death this summer in Kitakyushu. I found an online version at the New York Times website here. It's a very sad case, and it kind of strikes close to home since I lived in Fukuoka previously. My church used to give out food to the homeless once every two months, and I know of other churches that had similar activities on a larger and more regular scale, so the presence of such poor people is no surprise to me. Unfortunately, they remain mainly an invisible problem to the public in Japan. Not many people actually think of them. The whole incident strikes me as very sad.