일본의 복지미용사제도에 대한 고찰

A Study on the Welfare Hairdresser System in Japan

Korea will enter a super-aging society by 2025, according to population estimates. It is thought that the ordinary people will stop thinking about beauty as they become older, but for the elderly, beauty is becoming a means of improving the quality of life. According to the results of a study in Japan, it is said that elderly people increase their confidence and happiness through cosmetic therapy, resulting in reducing depression and anxiety. In Japan, beauty care for the elderly goes beyond simply trying to be beautiful, and is called beauty welfare. Beauty care provides social welfare services to elderly people or people with disabilities by providing them with basic knowledge of nursing care and the technology in order to provide safe and comfortable beauty treatments. The purpose of this study is to determine whether beauty activities contributing to social welfare services could be institutionally supported in Korea. The reason is that in Japan, the concept of beauty welfare has been established since 1999, and through this, nursing care beauticians and welfare beauticians are currently being trained and working as experts in beauty welfare, whereas in Korea, we have not even defined beauty welfare yet. As a result, we are unable to cultivate professional manpower capable of providing beauty welfare. Therefore, this paper examined the beauty welfare system, focusing on Japanese literature, to examine how Japan’s beauty workers are institutionally defined and what role they play. The implication obtained from this is that it would be good to open and operate a beauty welfare department at a university so that people can work as beauty welfare experts, or at least to reorganize the system so that those who are qualified as beauticians can acquire basic knowledge of welfare and nursing and can work.