The State of Japanese Welfare, Welfare and the Japanese State

Abstract

This chapter uses a detailed case study of the Japanese social care system as a means of highlighting some of the embedded assumptions in the development of, and literature on, the Anglo-Saxon and Scandinavian welfare models, in particular in relation to the public/private divide in the provision, financing and regulation of welfare services. In comparison with these western systems, the Japanese system has been characterized by: relatively low public spending; greater reliance on family, community and corporations; an emphasis on social policy as investment rather than as a safety net. The delivery of social care has been characterized by (i) reliance on unpaid local volunteers (minseiiin) under the direction of local government bureaucrats and (ii) the placement of those who come into the care of the state in privately-owned (minkan) institutions, which are regulated and almost completely funded by the state under what is known as the sochi-seido system. Both the minseiiin and sochi-seido systems have provided interesting challenges to the normative assumptions about ‘rights’, ‘citizenship’ and ‘professionalization’ of welfare delivery that are embedded in much of the western literature on social policy.

This chapter is written from the background of a social anthropologist who stumbled into the study of social policy and social welfare.