TOKYO — Acknowledging a sharp rise in homelessness, Japan's government plans to open shelters for the swelling ranks of street people generated by the country's stubborn economic slowdown.

"We have programs to help poor people, but the number of homeless is increasing, and the current system alone cannot cope with the situation," said Hiroshi Nanba, an official at the Health and Welfare Ministry.

The ministry is requesting $1.8 million in the 2001 budget to build temporary housing around the country.

The plan is to provide sleeping rooms for up to 2,000 people in shelters for use at night and for bathing. The national government will shoulder half the cost, with municipalities covering the rest. The location and size of the shelters will depend on what local governments request, Nanba said.

Japan's homeless problem is not as severe or as chronic as that of the United States, for example, but it is growing.

The latest estimate from the ministry, in December 1999, put the number of homeless at 20,451. That's up significantly from the figure given a year earlier, 16,247.

The estimate in the United States, with a population double Japan's, is about 700,000.

Japan's homeless are mostly men in their 50s — often laborers too old or frail to do the work they spent a lifetime on or office workers laid off and unable to find a new job amid bankruptcies and restructuring.

Although Japan's homeless rarely beg, they often face opposition from the neighborhoods they live in. Dozens of homeless people were evicted from a walkway in Japan's second city, Osaka, several years ago because of noise complaints. Elsewhere, attacks on homeless people by young gangs have at times turned deadly.

But the increasing frequency of job loss means that the homeless are not seen as quite so remote any more: The homeless are spilling out of Japan's chaotic city centers and into the suburbs, even into smaller provincial cities, as urban jobs dwindle.

Their tidy encampments in city parks — including one across from the National Museum in Tokyo's Ueno Park — are notable for the cardboard and blue tarps used for shelter, the laundry hung out to dry and the lack of litter. Even pocket-sized parks often have an inhabitant or two stretched out to sleep on flattened cardboard boxes, shoes set trustingly to one side.

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Central to the problem are an unemployment rate hovering near record highs above 4.5 percent, high housing costs and an economy still in the doldrums a decade after the burst of the affluent "bubble economy" of the 1980s.

Homelessness was not, until recently, enough of an issue to figure in the government's social safety net. While health care is heavily subsidized in Japan and people get unemployment and many other benefits, there is little help for those slipping toward the street.

Once they are there, there is even less. Some private groups distribute food or old clothes, but there has been little government involvement beyond municipalities offering short-term sleeping space in the colder months and sometimes a menial job at City Hall.

In May 1999, the central government announced its first plan to help the homeless, working with local officials in Tokyo, Osaka and other cities to help them find jobs, rejoin the mainstream of society and regain their health.

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