Altern und Pflegepolitik in Japan (Aging and Long-Term Care Policy in Japan)

While economic globalization has cast serious doubts on the future of the welfare state in many industrialized countries, because of population aging, the problem of long-term care for the elderly has grown into a readily felt burden during the last decades. In Japan, one even hears of “care hell” (kaigo jigoku) into which a family falls once one of its members is in need of care. The problem of long-term care might well turn into a test-case for the reformability of the welfare state and reveals  “modernization gaps” in the industrialized countries on several levels. On the macro level, it lays open the limits of an ever more pervasive social security system in terms of financing, personnel recruitment, and desirability. On the micro level, in the family, it increases the ambivalence between the attachment to traditional values and modern, individualistic goals which women as the most frequent care providers get to feel in particular.

How do people cope with population aging and the resulting challenges for long-term care policy in Japan? How does social change affect family care in Germany and Japan? In conjunction with the symposium “Aging and Social Policy – A German-Japanese Comparison” (Universitätsclub Bonn, 27 October 1997) of the German Institute for Japanese Studies (DIJ), this booklet is intended to provide information about different aspects of the long-term care problem in order to stimulate discussion. In the first part, Ralph Lützeler discusses the demographic, regional and household-structural particulars of population aging in Japan with a view to their effects on long-term care. In the second part, Christian Oberländer analyses the development of care needs and the provision of care by the family and then poses the question to what extent Japanese long-term care policy is adequately reacting to changes in family care.