Abstract
Official identification of a person with a disability and the degree of his/her impairment have been made by medical doctors in Japan. And according to the degree of the impairment the provision of social welfare services has been made. However the correlation between the levels of impairment and participation restriction has been weakened owing to the development of rehabilitation services and normalization policies. Therefore the government has tried to improve the eligibility scheme by introducing the new Disability Degree System, but this change still falls under the medical model and the problem of eligibility is growing more serious. A new eligibility policy for individual needs assessment needs to be developed which respects social work professionals and pays more attention to the voice of service users with disabilities.
