Aging Society in Japan:

This paper examines the challenge of an aging society in Japan, with a focus on the development of elderly care policy and practice and the roles of civil society organizations. The aging process of Japanese society has two distinct differences from other aged countries in the developed world, thus its experience may become a useful case for other countries. First, the speed at which Japanese society has aged is much faster than in other Western industrialized countries, and second, Japan lacked a welfare state system to support an aging society, at least until recently. Utilizing the analytical frameworks of the “welfare diamond” model and of social innovation theory, this paper briefly describes the historical processes of elderly care service development in post-war Japan, in particular the Long-Term Care Insurance (LTCI) system and the community-based integrated care model. Then it introduces some cases to describe the contributions of civil society organizations. Finally, it reveals that Japan has built a fairly effective system to provide quality elderly care, which is also changing people’s understanding about elderly care or social welfare in general. However, this system has also created another “silo” in social welfare as well as people’s dependence on the system. And in a shrinking society, the system lacks the financial and human resources necessary to sustain itself. In the future, Japanese society may need to consider an alternative way, based on general social work and coordination, which can encompass different needs in society. Civil society organizations have different roles to play in such processes, including i) creating new initiatives and partnerships, ii) supporting diffusion and scaling of initiatives through knowledge sharing, iii) funding new initiatives at the start-up and scaling stages, and iv) providing services within established systems.