VISITORS to Japan rarely encounter the usual markers of privation. Housing is not run down. The urban homeless are out of sight, in makeshift tents in public parks or down by river banks. Japanese cherish a belief that theirs is an egalitarian society. So high poverty among children should come as a shock. Official figures on child poverty were not even published until 2009. They show that the rate of (relative) child poverty—defined as the proportion of children in households with income after tax and transfers of less than half the national median household income—rose from 11% in 1985 to 16% in 2012, one of the highest rates among OECD countries. The gap between well-off and poor children is more pronounced in Japan than in America, and not far off levels in Mexico and Bulgaria, said Unicef last month.

Couples who both work in low-paid irregular or contract jobs, which now make up around two-fifths of all employment, are particularly badly off. But roughly a third of poor children live with divorced or widowed single mothers. Akiko Kamon, a single mother of two young boys in a hard-up area of Osaka, says she struggles to feed them properly. She wanted to work longer hours to earn more money, but her eight-year-old son burst into tears at the prospect of being left alone. Like many, Ms Kamon won’t take the paltry general welfare on offer, so great in Japan is the social stigma.

Single parents sometimes leave children as young as five at home during the day or night, with a bento box for food. Poverty raises the odds of worse-off children dropping out of school or even sleeping rough. Chiatsu Sumi, the 16-year-old daughter of a single mother from Saitama, near Tokyo, works part-time. But she says she still finds it hard to afford compulsory school trips, the four different kinds of shoes that her school requires and other extras. Poor children are especially prone to being bullied, she says.

Poor kids are not starving, but often the school lunch is their only proper meal, with junk food supplementing their diet. Gas and electricity are often cut off when parents cannot pay the bills, so children end up washing in public toilets. As for socialising with friends in cafés, or affording after-school cramming classes—considered essential for getting into university—these activities are out of the question.

The government is starting to take notice. New measures in 2014 increased the number of social workers in schools and slightly lifted child allowances for single parents for the first time in years. Given that many in the (conservative) ruling Liberal Democratic Party blame single mums for getting divorced, it was surprising that the party did that much, says Aya Abe, who heads a poverty-research unit at Tokyo Metropolitan University.

It may come under pressure to do more. For a government that recently pledged to ensure that every Japanese citizen can play an active role in society, child poverty is awkward. The office of the prime minister, Shinzo Abe, is devising ways to pitch his economic policies as especially helping the young rather than the elderly (on whom the state already spends generously). But competing with recent newspaper headlines about poor children stealing, resorting to prostitution or living in squalid conditions may prove rather hard.