Abstract
The difference of between Japan and Europe in a history of relief is in that the premodern rulers' charity has developed into a national relief system in Japan and the premodern mutual aid has developed into a public relief system in Europe. Human being has lived together in a community, so the mutual aid is a from of the most primitive relief and has existed both in Japan and in Europe. But in Europe the mutual aid has developed into a public system and in Japan Otherwise, the mutual aid declined and the rulers' charity has developed into a national system. For that, in modern Europe people thought that the relief was based on whole nation's cooperation but in modern Japan people understood that the relief was given to the nation by rulers. Baien Miura's idea of the Jihimujin(a relief fund)mentioned in this paper, however, shows that also in Japan the mutual aid could develope into a public system. In addition to that, his theory of poverty contained a modern ethical view that says a holy of labor, which didn't appear in Japanese philosophers at 18 or 19 century. This shows that the possibility to form a modern theory of poverty existed. In this paper I picked up Baien Baien Miura, a philosopher in the last of feudal socieiy, and analyzed his theory of poverty in order to make it clear that the history of relief in Japan is different from that in Europe structurally.
