| Research Abstract |
This study examined the nature of the current Japanese welfare state by focusing on policies towards the family and child care, and by comparing with the case of the Netherlands. The examination of the developmental trajectory of family and child care policies in Japan over the last half a century reveals a discontinuous pattern of policy shifts and contradictions as the state attempts to negotiate its policies in response to various social, economic, and political imperatives. Throughout the postwar era, the Japanese welfare state shifted its positions regarding the family and child care by weighing the country's economic needs for women's labour against the various fiscal and demographic pressures.
The examination of the child care policies highlights how women have served as the adjustment for the economic development within and outside of the family. With the recent changes in social and demographic trends, women have again become a key variable in the welfare state restructuring. T
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he comparison of the Dutch welfare state also illustrates how another strong male breadwinner welfare state is also faced with a similar contradiction today.
While women have been an important tool of adjustment for the Japanese welfare state in reconciling its economic and social objectives, this study has also found that Japanese women have not been passive subjects quietly accepting the state policies. Even in a strongly bureaucratic state like Japan, the state has not been able to set and determine social policies single handedly. As this study illustrates, women have also been actively, and passively, engaged in the policy making: by taking social and political action through women's groups to push for their interests, and by taking individual actions such as entering into the labour market, delaying marriage, and controlling the number of child birth and thereby making it known their personal agenda.
Finally, this study shows the contradictions faced by a conservative and highly gendered welfare state today. It shows that the Japanese welfare state's strong breadwinner regime orientation has created preconditions for women to opt out of the traditional gendered family structure which in turn is subverting the basic principle of the regime. In response to this the state has no choice but to consider ways to reconcile the contradiction. In this case the Japanese state has opted to extend social welfare particularly those related to the care of the young and the old. Less
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