한국과 일본의 노인복지정책 형성 및 전개과정 비교 ‒사회문화적 관점의 접근‒

Abstract

The purpose of this study is to compare and examine the establishment and changes of welfare policies for the elderly in Korea and Japan from a socio-cultural perspective. The welfare policies for the elderly in Korea and Japan have been changed and developed in many aspects due to the rapid aging in the two countries. Most of the factors that have explained such developing and differences so far include political environments around the policies and situations of economic development. However, that is mainly related to the times for the establishment of the policies, that is to say, the timing in which the welfare policies for the elderly begin to be introduced on the basis of political and economic elements in the course of policy making. Paying attention to why the policies were selected or not selected in such times with such contents, this study tries to approach the influencing factors from a socio-cultural perspective. With respect to what is the socio-cultural perspective, this study regards it as familism in the historical context including modern families and the presentation of Japan-style welfare society, and the objects of the analysis in this study include the long-term care insurance system for the elderly. As for the long-term care insurance system, focus is put on the examination of whether cash payments for family care, a factor most sharply influenced by familism, are admitted. In Japan, claims for and against this issue has continued in the course of policy making. Consequentially, Japan has decided to inhibit cash payments for family care due to the influence of familism because women’s responsibility for care with the compensation by cash payments is recognized as a repeated realization of the traditional family responsibility emphasized by the policy purposes in the earlier Japan-style welfare society. Korea has been similar to Japan. The Korean government decided to inhibit cash payments for family care though the majority of the people turned out to support the system in a pole at that time. This was an adverse decision for the traditional familist emotion as in Japan, and the influence of historical legacy. That is to say, the approval of family care would be criticized as it was to burden families with care roles, and the purposes of the socialization by a new institution seemed void. Second, in the case of Korea, we can tell that a political convergence for family care worked. Thus, though acknowledging the necessity of cash payments, Korea is influenced by learning the care insurance system in advance as Korean families’ characteristics were different from German families’ and Japan already experienced the same troubles. We can say that Korea took the way to reach the conclusion by learning other countries’ systems.