Japan’s “Net café refugees” now total 5,400 nationwide

I read a news article on Japan's "Net cafe refugees" [jp].

According to a first ever study released on August 28 by the Ministry of Health, Labor and Welfare, about 5400 people are estimated to be “Net café refugees” who do not have fixed address and spend nights at Internet cafes.

It was a new word for me, but people who have no home and spend nights at Internet cafes are now dubbed "Net cafe refugees (Nanmin in Japanese)".

People have been using net cafes as an inexpensive substitute for hotels when they missed the last train, but recently growing number of people are using it as a substitute for home.

According to the national survey, 8% of the respondents said they "do not have a home" and using Net cafe as a "place to spend nights". Those kind of net café users are estimated to amount to 5400 across Japan.

You might think that Net cafe users are mostly young people, but that’s not true:

People in their 20s make up the largest group by 27%, but people in their 50s also make up 23%, showing that the use of net cafes is spreading into the range of elderly people. The study also showed that half of the net café refugees were working on day jobs, supporting the view that the unstable, cheap labors are the underlying cause for this phenomenon.

Fiftysomethings are now making up the significant portion of netcafe users.

According to another article on this study[jp]:

Among the respondents, only about 600 people were short-term (such as a day) haken workers dispatched from staffing agencies who were considered to be the typical net cafe refugees. Instead, about 1200 were short-term directly-hired workers (ex. part-timers who work for less than one month or day workers), and 1000 were long-term contingent workers.

I saw an ex-haken worker on TV who terminated the apartment-lease because he couldn't find work and pay the renewal fee, and now unexpectedly having a hard time to sign a new lease.