THE JOURNALIST YOKOYAMA Gennosuke found it curious that “even though society invariably is propelled by nameless people, social commentators focus on people with names. They leave out those who have no names.” He made his observation in 1910, after years of studying the nameless people: first as one of them, a teenaged student sleeping in flophouses and temples, and then as a reporter eager to understand what he called the kasō shakai, or underclass (literally: society of the lower classes). For nearly two decades after becoming a reporter for the paper Mainichi Shinbun in 1894 at age twenty-four, he roamed the slums of Osaka and Tokyo; he also journeyed to the mountains of Ashio, where miners sucked in ore dust and died young; he walked the aisles of Kiryū textile factories, where teenaged girls cowered before lecherous supervisors; and he crossed the sea to find out how emigrants to Korea lived. Some of the people he saw were dullards, he concluded, “staring silently at the skies and sitting dejectedly around empty hibachi”; many were “intelligent and clever.” But all of them evoked a new Japan, an explosion of “modern” energy during the 1890s and 1900s that led to the growth of both wealth and poverty. While his peers chronicled the successes of the wealthy, he gave his attention to the have nots. It is my intention to do likewise, to tell the story of how the poor – particularly those in the cities – experienced life in the late-Meiji years.

Between 1888 and 1903, Tokyo's population grew by more than 1,000 people every week, skyrocketing from 1.4 million to 2.3 million, while Osaka increased at half that rate, from 1.2 million to 1.7 million. And the changes in urban life were phenomenal. In the decade sandwiching the turn of the century, Japan won two major foreign wars and became an imperial power. School attendance rates nearly doubled, according to official statistics, to more than 95 percent.