WE KNOW ONLY a few things about the coal collector who eked out an existence in Osaka's slum neighborhoods early in the 1900s. He had a twenty-four-year-old wife, a three-year-old son, and wages of twelve or thirteen yen a month – about half of what a railway conductor made, and a third as much as an ironworker. We know too that these wages barely covered food, housing, and rented bedding, leaving the family dependent for everything else on the two yen his wife took each month making straw sandals. The government records tell us nothing about the man's name, his social life, nor how he survived on so little. They do, however, provide one additional scrap of information, and it is important. He was a migrant to the city: born on a farm on Japan's Kii Peninsula, then taken to Osaka after his mother died in the 1880s.

The importance of that additional fact lies in the evidence it presents of something that became increasingly obvious to me across the last dozen years, as I pored over material on the daily lives of hinmin or poor people during the last half of Japan's Meiji era (1868–1912). Setting out on the study, I thought of poverty simply as poverty. Impoverished people were poor; they had trouble putting food on the table; life was cruel. As I read the accounts of journalists, statisticians, and poor people themselves, however, I discovered something I should have known: poverty is as nuanced and variegated as the people who experience it, and one of the biggest factors in determining its nuances was whether people lived in the city or in the village.

Before looking at the differences between urban and rural hardship in the late Meiji years, it is essential to note two or three general features of poverty then. The first was that being poor was not unusual. Scholars have determined that as many as sixty percent of all Japanese – more than 25 million people – were poor in the late 1800s and that one of every six or seven city-dwellers was desperately poor.