I do not trust any stats that come out of Japan in terms of homelessness. If there's a statistic that's embarrassing for Japanese society, you know damn well they're gonna try to cover it up with technicalities.

In Japan, the legal definition for someone who is homeless is: "those who use city parks, riverbanks, roads, train stations and other facilities as their place of stay in order to live their daily lives."

So that doesn't include living in your car, living in insecure housing, living in shelters, or living in internet cafés, of which in 2020 there were about 15,000 'net café refugees' in Tokyo alone.

Sooo yeah, Japan can claim to officially have a super low homeless population, because they've narrowed the definition so much that you have to literally be sleeping on the street for it to count.