日時：2023年12月12日（火）15時～16時40分

場所：センター会議室（赤門総合研究棟 5F・詳細地図）/オンライン（Zoom）

参加方法：所外の方はこちらのお申込フォームからお申込ください。 オンライン参加ご希望の方には、12月11日までにZoomのURLを送付いたします。

(申込締切日：12月8日)

報告要旨

Anthropology is the study of ethnographic puzzles. This talk starts by looking back at three research projects undertaken since the early 1980s which examined how private institutions dealing with the care and education of young people in Japan counterintuitively survived the rapid decline in the number of such people in the population in the context of a new political rhetoric of neo-liberalist market economics. Modelling in the mid-1980s showed that would be a 40% drop in the number of children coming into the school system over the next twenty years which was predicted to have a major impact on the number of private senior high schools (which constituted 70% of all senior high schools); between 1975-95, the total number of births in Japan dropped by over 37% which was predicted to have a major impact on the number of private children’s homes (yōgoshisetsu) which constituted around 90% of all children’s homes; between 1992-2002, the number of 18/19-year olds in the population (who made up 95% of university entrants) decreased by 30% which was widely expected to lead to an equal number of private universities (which catered to over 75% of all students) to disappear.

This talk examines why in each case the predictions of mass bankruptcies and closures made by policy-makers working with models of economic rationality proved so misplaced. It is proposed that much of the answer to these conundrums lie in the fact that so many educational and welfare institutions in Japan are family-run businesses, designed to be passed on from one generation to the next. Continuity and reputation are key and act as sources of inbuilt resilience that over-ride models of economic efficiency led by supply and demand.

The final part of the talk extends the study to ask questions about the involvement of family business in the medical field in Japan. Today, around 80% of all hospitals and 90% of all clinics in Japan are private, mainly family, businesses. How does this structure of family hospitals and clinics in Japan affect the pattern of patient care? How will it respond to Japan’s demography which shrunk last year by 800,000 people and will soon be shrinking by up to a million people a year? In what ways will it demonstrate resilience in a post-COVID world?

The talk ends with one further puzzle: why is there so little research in Japan on family-run educational, welfare and medical institutions when they are such an important element of each sector?