Japan is aging rapidly, and its government has been groping with
the implications of this profound social change. In a pioneering
study of postwar Japanese social policy, John Creighton Campbell
traces the growth from small beginnings to an elaborate and
expensive set of pension, health care, employment, and social
service programs for older people. He argues that an understanding
of policy change requires a careful disentangling of social
problems and how they come to be perceived, the invention (or
borrowing) of policy solutions, and conflicts and coalitions among
bureaucrats, politicians, interest groups, and the general public.
The key to policy change has often been the strategies adopted by
policy entrepreneurs to generate or channel political energy. To
make sense of all these complex processes, the author employs a new
theory of four "modes" of decision-making--cognitive, political,
artifactual, and inertial. Campbell refutes the claim that there is
a unique "Japanese-style welfare state." Despite the big
differences in cultural values, social arrangements, economic
priorities, and political control, government responsibility for
the "aging-society problem" is broadly similar to that in advanced
Western nations. However, Campbell's account of how Japan has taken
on that responsibility raises new issues for our understanding of
both Japanese politics and theories of the welfare state.
Originally published in 1992.
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