| Research Abstract |
The care of aged people has been a very important issue for Japanese society these days. Though the Family-care Law was enacted in 2000, the burden of caring for aged people concentrate on women as it used to be, especially for the heir's spouses, "yo-me". The longer the period is and the heavier the burden is, the in-house care-work is still left unpaid. How we can decentralize / evaluate the care-work?
Under the awareness of the issues, we analyzed this theme from three different approaches, which are economics, legal and social.
As for the economic approach, to evaluate care-work, we conducted a questionnaire on middle-aged people in Nagano Prefecture. Most of them think that it is surely that the care for the elderly is a considerable burden and unfair, and their unpaid care work is equal to the regular employers' wages, but at the same time, they do not desire to evaluate their care-work economically. Among farming families, a new rule effective for only family persons, Family Management Agreement, has been introduced and has tried to decentralize/evaluate the married women's care work.
By legal approach, we referred to the judicial precedent about the contribution "kiyo-bun"(Article 904-2,in Civil Law), which was added in 1980. The process of this article's enactment is highly suggestive and actually, this article has been used for judicial decision in the evaluation of in house-care-work, but that article is fundamentally effective for a legal heir, this article leaves many other problems to be solved.
And by social approach, we have had direct interviews with people who use local currencies such as COMO in Tokyo Prefecture, PEANUT in Chiba Prefecture, and DASUKE in Niigata Prefecture, and surveyed several inter-generational programs. We found that in many areas, to live more comfortably in every day life, they try to re-generate and re-structure the community power using these currencies and programs.
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