Japanese Senior Care Systems

　

　

The ministry of Health and Welfare (1995) announced that one fourth of the population of Japan will be seniors whose age is more than 65 years old in 2025. ※Please look at a graph below.
This graph was quoted from "Statistics of population"(National institute of population and social security research, 1999), If you look at the graph, you can see that Japan has been changed into an aging society with very rapid speed. This rapid changing seems to be a cause of many problems for seniors in Japan.

　

　

I have been wondering that Japanese seniors were happy or not. Many Japanese seniors seem to have no reason for living. In addition, they seem to feel loneliness. Some people commit suicide alone because of the loneliness.


I have been to many senior care institutions in Japan. Whenever I went to those institutions, I could not help wondering that society in Japan does not admit rights of old people. Senior care institutions in Japan are like preschools. Seniors there have been doing childish games or handicrafts all day long. They tend to wear dark clothes and nobody is smiling.

When I visited a senior care center in Japan and interviewed an old lady who stayed there, she said (2000), "Active senior are hated because many Japanese think that seniors should be passive and weak". I wondered if people get older, should they be more passive. I prejudged that to be old is to lose own reason for living. I thought that people can not live happily after they get old. If so, I felt that I did not want to be a senior.


Japanese senior care systems are something wrong, should be changed. They made seniors lead unhappy life. I wondered how we can change Japanese senior care system and where the differences between Canadian and Japanese senior care systems come from.

　

Now Japan has many problems about senior cares. For example, it has been increasing old people who die alone without being noticed by anyone because they live alone. If a senior live alone, there are no people who notice his or her abnormality in the house.

Why they should live alone?

It seems to be one of the reasons that seniors in Japan seem to be unhappy. Riedmann, Lamannna and Nelson mentioned in their book: "Marriages and Families" (2003) that family styles are changing according to the times.

As they mentioned, Japanese family styles has also been changing. Once there were large numbers of people in a family. Seniors lived with their children. In most case, a daughter-in-law had been taken care of seniors in the family. Now there are many nuclear families according to the increase of women who have been working after their marriage. That is why many seniors live alone.