ABSTRACT
Tracing back the history of minsei-iin (voluntary communal welfare workers), who have constituted the largest number of people engaged in social-welfare work in Japan up to the present time, we can discern throughout its development a specific pattern of continuity and change, which can be defined more precisely as institutional continuity and functional change. This relationship of continuity and change showed itself most clearly at the point of the most fundamental break in its history at the end of World War II and the beginning of the Occupation era in Japan, when the previous ideological entanglement of this body of voluntary welfare workers with war-time activities brought the system to the verge of dissolution.
