Publisher's Synopsis
The book offers the English-speaking readership of the West a new perspective to the welfare state by examining how the Western models of welfare states/societies have been understood and made sense of in Japan. The book provides a balanced description of the Japan?s case, as Japan shares similar problems to other Western societies in the social welfare coping with the aging of society. The book supplies plenty of new materials concerning the development of welfare society in Japan, from an historical background before 1945 to the contemporary Japanese discourses of welfare. Methodologically the book offers a new approach to the study of welfare society by applying 'hermeneutics' to the analysis of Japanese welfare discourse. - - In relation to comparative approaches to various models of the welfare state and welfare society, this book should clarify what kind of understanding is given to 'welfare state' and 'welfare society' in Japan. True, Japan has increasingly stirred interest among English-speaking academics of Social Policy, yet the Eurocentric perspectives on the welfare state leads to an oversimplification in discussions of the Japanese case. This book offers a review of the oft-touted 'Confucian model.' This model is the 'straw man' in studies of international social dealing with Asian societies in contrast to those of the West. - - This book sets out by discussing the historical background of welfare policy in modern Japan since the end of the 19th century, but does not restrict itself to a quantitative description of the development of the Japanese welfare state ? through mechanical presentation on the level of statistics - but includes social welfare practices and the social security system. Nor does it concentrate solely on an analysis of the welfare state at the level of public policy. Rather, this book pays special attention to social relevance in analyzing the social discourses on the politics of welfare in Japan. More specifically, the book takes into account a broad range of social and political factors in scrutinizing the multifaceted nature of the 'political culture' where the politics of welfare is made sense of. - -
