ABSTRACT
Contrary to the widespread notion about Japan’s ‘lost decade’ in the 1990s, much has in fact happened. One of the most important changes has been the expansion of social care. Shaken by the grim reality of rapid population ageing, compounded by an inexorable fertility decline, the Japanese government introduced a public Long-Term Care Insurance scheme (LTCI), expanded public childcare, put forward women- and family-friendly employment legislations, and implemented a variety of support services for families to promote childbirth and childrearing. Together these measures represent not only a turnaround from the earlier policies of welfare retrenchment, but also, and more fundamentally, a noticeable break from its traditional familialistic welfare-state ideology of little or no direct state role in family welfare, least of all, that which aims to unburden women’s care responsibility.
