This article introduces the activities of Carillon Children Center, which organizes shelters for battered children. The Carillon Children's home is an emergency shelter for children ages 15 to 19, who are suffering child abuse and need to take shelter from their family. In order to take children into protective custody, lawyers must act on legal grounds. In these situations, parental authority makes it difficult to take them into shelter. Although the system of parental authority was reformed in 2012, many problems still remain. Further amendment should be considered regarding children's rights, and we must continue to advocate for abused children through the activities of this shelter.

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    For many years, Japan has left the provision of support for family members to live in the community to the families themselves and, when they become unable to stay at home, sought solutions that made use of hospitals and institutions. Since the 1980s, welfare for the elderly has been developed within the framework of community welfare, a field of social welfare, although there remain challenges. The wishes of persons with disabilities have been addressed through community welfare policies as well.
    On the other hand, child welfare still depends on the families. Child poverty and bullying among children have both increased, leading to the enactment of specialized legislation. Protective measures in the field of child welfare, implemented primarily through prefectural child guidance centers, are insufficient in quantitative terms and slow in being transformed into efforts by municipalities. Nevertheless, child centers, which should be the core of community projects for children's development, have become rental spaces; many children in urban districts are on a waiting list for admission into day-care centers. This makes it impossible to expect that these local facilities will provide rehabilitative support for children in need of protection or preventive support before protection needs arise.
    Community life is in crisis for children and their families with challenges in child-rearing. The survey explored ways to relieve children from suffering caused by the imposition of challenges in child welfare policies as their own responsibility, by referring to child-rearing practices by teenage parents, who are themselves children by definition but at the same time a target group for child-rearing support, as well as to challenges in providing support for them.

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    This paper considers how foster parents support kinship care-givers, by examining the “kinship care-givers' support program” in Iwate after the Great East Japan Earthquake. After the earthquake, many people started to foster young relatives who had lost their parents. The Iwate Foster Parents Association (IFPA) tried to support them through this program. The IFPA has provided this program since October 2011.
    I interviewed the president of the IFPA and found that foster parents were finding it difficult to support kinship care-givers, even though they both sides fostered children. Foster parents were unable to share their experiences because the reasons for deciding to be foster care-givers and the challenges and stresses they faced were quite different. Therefore, foster parents could not support kinship care-givers by drawing similarities between their experiences. Instead, the foster parents came to see the kinship care-givers every month only to be with them and informed them that they both lived in Iwate Prefecture and that the foster parents could take care of the children if kinship foster parenting became too difficult for them.

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    This paper examines male caregivers, who have rarely been investigated in studies, and even then often in a negative way. The purpose is to explore the difficulties peculiar to men, as described by the male caregiver himself. First, following interviews, categories such as “men” and “husband / son” were identified. The men detailed the difficulties they faced in caregiving. The men's views on issues related to family caregiving were analyzed qualitatively through the framework of a gender model. Results indicated coexistence of work and caregiving, housework, physical contact while caregiving (e.g., giving a bath), and wanting to provide perfect caregiving as issues. Furthermore, the male caregivers' views on gender were seen to be the root of these issues. The study showed that while they took on the task of caregiving, they viewed it as a task for women.

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    This paper aims at clarifying the urban public mentality toward “Ie” in the middle of the early modern period. Specifically, it analyzes 11 plays of the sewa-mono type written by popularly supported dramatist Chikamatsu Monzaemon treating incidents that actually occurred at that time.
    It is common in all the stories for the male protagonists to be married into their wife's family as an essential element for the story's continuation. Conflicted over the family structure, these male characters develop a self-denying attitude. The representation analysis of the Chikamatsu episodes given here illuminates the complexity of the popular mentality toward Ie organization, which cannot be simply characterized as either a positive or a negative feeling in a dualistic sense.

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    The aim of this study is to explore the factors of parents' expectations for care in old age with focusing on economic background of the parents. In particular, I investigate the effects of household income and household savings on the respondent's expectation of oldage support from children by analyzing survey data which was conducted by the Cabinet Office in 2007. The result of the analysis shows the economic situation influences on the expectation only in women's sample. In concrete, household savings shows curve effect on the expectation. This means that the relatively wealthy parents and also relatively poor parents have high expectations compared to the other parents.

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    Since the 1980s in Japan, late marriage and non-marriage have become increasingly common, and the problem of decreasing birthrates has gained ever greater attention. In this social setting, the importance of research on “romantic love” before marriage has come to be recognized. However, studies of “romantic love” before marriage are still relatively few in number in the area of family sociology. This paper aims to consider the meaning of “romantic love” among young adults by focusing on their rhetoric and gender perspective. My data are based on four group discussions and semi-structured interviews with heterosexual single men and women born between 1983 and 1993.

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