Poverty offers a useful window onto a society’s organization and values. The poor are not some timeless, universal category of those who “have not.” Rather, they are products of specific geotemporal configurations of economic, social, and political power. Ideologically and practically, the poor are assigned a place in a given sociopolitical order, and understanding how they occupy or transgress that place helps us understand the mechanisms that evolve to sustain a system or that prove inadequate to that task. The two books under review address chronologically adjacent yet substantially different moments in the history of poverty in Japan. Together, they show the evolution of a set of social relations that underpinned the Tokugawa order, and the ways in which a dramatically increased concentration of urban poor people were left largely to fend for themselves in the midst of the social, economic, and political upheavals of the late Meiji years..
