Elder Care in Japan

Not only China, there are other countries also suffering from an aging population in the world, such as Japan and European countries. However, countries’ situations differ according to social, cultural, or economic factors, but Japan has a similar aging population issue, promoting community-based eldercare centers as well.

Japan currently has the highest ratio of the aging population which is 28 percent in the world, and its pension industry can be divided into the home-based model, the two-generation residential model, and the facility model according to an article from Zhihu by Sancy. Among them, the home-based model and the two-generation residential model are very similar to community-based elder caring in China, which provides various types of care services, such as home care and home visits. Facility elderly care is similar to institutional elderly care in China such as public nursing homes and private senior care centers. However, the proportion of elderly people who choose to live at home and two-generation residence is over 95.5%, and home-based care occupies the absolute mainstream of the market, similar to the situation in China.

As a country against the aging population issue for more than forty years, Japan has much more experience than China that we can learn from. To be more specific, in the article “Community elderly care: What kind of experience does Japan have to learn from?”, the author introduces a new form of community-based care center which is the daycare elder center in Japan, and only Tokyo has more than 28,000 of them. I am not saying that in China we don’t have this type of elder care, but it provides us a new insight to solve the two problems of not enough types of caring services and not enough funding. Also, a large number of daycare institutions continue to expand in direct or chain ways. For example, DHC is a well-known cosmetics company in Japan, and they attract consumers with free makeup services while providing basic nursing services for the elder. Moreover, many daycare institutions provide special services for the elders according to their needs. For instance, there is one daycare center emphasizing the equipment skills training for the elderly men, while the other claims that they have unique treatment for the elderly with dementia.

Reference

Sancy. (2019, May 18). 从日本养老产业模式看我国养老产业的未来发展. Zhihu. https://zhuanlan.zhihu.com/p/66207530.

Team, C. C. D. A. (2019, January 14). 社区养老：日本有哪些经验可供学习？Community elderly care: What kind of experience does Japan have to learn from? China Community Development Association. http://shequxiehui.net.cn/article-244-1.html.