This paper attempts to clarify the current situation and challenges of the social sector, which is responsible for the sustainable development of local community. Japanese urban and rural areas face various social problems which the social sector is trying to solve as a social business. These social business activities in the social sector can only be achieved to be accompanied with social innovation in the sense of transforming into a sustainable community. To achieve that end, in this paper, first, we consider how regional development up to now has been combined with sustainable community development. Second, we establish the social sector as a leader in sustainable community development and elucidate its organizations and functions that can contribute to the local community. Third, we focus on social business and explore its potential. Fourth, we pay attention on social innovation and analyze how it will be creating change in the region. Finally, we consider community design and eco-system for sustainable development. In a conclusion, we would like to show the possibility that the social sector will generate many social businesses and promote social innovation in the community.

The NPO Network for Youth Employment Support Shizuoka has been working on employment support called the Shizuoka method. This initiative started out as individual support for those who wanted to work but had difficulty doing so, but gradually shifted to the creation of mutually supportive relationships in the community. Through mutual transformation beyond the relationship of supporter and supported, we created a new sense of values and began to self-govern the space where the "insignificant" had been expelled. This self-governing space is slowly expanding and moving toward municipalism.

In this paper, we propose a participatory community that is loosely connected and can support and help each other in times of need as a form of community to enhance the sustainability of the local community. In order to foster such a community, it is necessary to share the direction of the community and to provide easy-to-understand information about the community. As an attempt to put this into practice, we introduced community development using goals and indicators in Kurobe and Shizuoka, and suggested the possibility of fostering local communities through the formation of autonomy by means of sharing local information and sympathy for the direction of the community.

While there has been the continuous publication of the books regarding the practitioners' practical efforts in less favoured areas in Japan, the research trend of the business in the regions has not been clarified. This paper aims at explaining the research trend. The author analyzed the contents of 184 research papers related to less-favored areas and 159 community business research papers. As a result of the analysis, the author found that the researchers showed increased interest in the topic when the related essential laws were enforced. The author also found the frequent usage of the word groups of agriculture, population movement, society, and economy in the research papers of the less-favored areas. Furthermore, the author also found that other community business-related papers often used other word-groups of the community, subjects, actions, and development. The author further introduces such cases of the community business like agriculture, elderly care, life infrastructure, and tourism, based on the content analysis of the community business in less-favored areas.

NPO as bridging social capital (SC) is a social sector for sustainable development of local communities. The purpose of this study is to discuss Japan's recent policy agenda: symbiotic communities and comprehensive care system focusing on SC and to provide a vision on sustainable local communities from the viewpoint of social welfare. First, the author summarizes Japan's recent policy development surrounding "symbiotic community" and "comprehensive care system". Next, the author introduces the results of quantitative survey analyzing the bonding SC and the bridging SC, both of which are effective for care-need prevention and child-rearing support in comprehensive care system. Further, the author presents two successful cases of sustainable community development in Shimane prefecture, mountainous areas, focusing on bonding and bridging SC. Finally, the author introduces the perception of AI among local residents about the possibility of replacing the work of volunteers and role of local government with AI. In conclusion, the author proposes an ideal form of SC to support local communities in a sustainable manner.

The purpose of this study is to clarify the role of the coordinator in long-term practical internships, from the case of a long-term practical internship to a small and medium-sized enterprise in the area where the coordinator supports the internship of a third-year university student who has experienced internships inside and outside the university. Comprehensive analysis of the student's diary during internships, records of tripartite interviews, material analysis using retrospective monitoring sheets, interview survey of related parties, etc. is carried out to visualize the role of the coordinator in realizing business results of local small and medium-sized enterprises. The research will enable the project to be modified based on the situation of the student and the company and the characteristics of the internship to the manager, with the three-way MTG by the coordinator, the company and the student playing an important role. As a result, we are able to understand that it plays an important role in effectively realizing business value.

This paper sheds light on how the Japanese translations of entrepreneurship and social entrepreneurship have remained unorganized for many years, which, in turn, has affected the entrepreneurial culture in Japan. This study contributes to the evolution of entrepreneurial culture in Japan by organizing social entrepreneurship and its related concepts through an examination of their Japanese translations. Regarding the validity of the research method, the methods of contrastive linguistics are used to increase the accuracy of and verify Japanese translations. Contrastive linguistics facilitates back-translation, which makes it possible to check whether a translation is correct or not by retranslating it into its original language. This paper proposes Japanese translations of entrepreneurship and social entrepreneurship and their methods, with the aim of contributing to a shift in Japan's entrepreneurial culture beyond the current mentality.

This paper clarifies whether the boomerang strategy of civil society organizations brings about political consequences through a case study of the Hate Speech Elimination Law. In previous studies, it has been argued that civil society organizations that have difficulty in accessing domestic politics produce political consequences through the boomerang pattern of exerting pressure through other countries and international organizations. On the other hand, some have argued that international pressure through the boomerang pattern is limited. However, the validity of the model is questionable and lacking in evidence. This paper examines the political process of hate speech regulation in Japan by constructing a hypothesis based on the rational choice theory. The results show that the combination of issue-salience and the election cycle changed the possible actions of the ruling party and the consequences, resulting in the enactment of incomplete laws to regulate discrimination. This showed that international pressure brought about by the boomerang strategy of civil society organizations could be exploited by domestic actors.

This study investigates the regional differences among nonprofit organizations (NPOs) in the field of community development based on the per capita average ordinary income of these NPOs in the same town, which shows the economic scale of these NPOs. This study uses 2013 data in the field of the community development in 19 prefectures in Japan. Among 885 towns within these prefectures, 515 have nonprofit organizations (NPOs) in the field of community development.The study result shows that the per capita average ordinary income of these NPOs in generally exhibits a downward trend as the population increase/decrease rate increases. In other words, the per capita average ordinary income of the NPOs in towns with the declining population is more than that of the NPOs in towns with a higher population increase rate. The population increase/decrease rate comprises three rates, birthrate, death rate, and social increase/decrease rate. Therefore, the population increase/decrease rate was divided into these tree rates, and multiple regression analysis was performed using each of the three rates.

In recent years, the way people work and live has changed drastically in Japan, and the connections and support of people in the local community have diminished. From now on, it is important to create a new community where "working" and "living" are adjacent to each other when considering the creation of a community, and this research focused on Social Firm. First, we will summarize the definition and outline of Social Firm that originated in Europe. Next, we conducted a scoping review of the literature on Social Firm in Japanese research journals and clarified the acceptance of the Social Firm concept in Japan. The result is (1) one of the social enterprises for the purpose of employment of persons with disabilities, (2) Employment targets are focused on persons with mental and intellectual disabilities, (3) Recognize diversity and have an equal relationship as colleagues who work together, (4) Not only create employment, but also tackle issues in the local community and consciously create connections with the local community. It became clear. In particular, the content shown in (4) is emphasized in Japanese social firm practice and is suggested as a feature of concept acceptance.

This paper discusses Kobe Social Campus and Kobe Social Bridges, which are citizen participation projects whose volunteer coordination is conducted by the nonprofit organization Sharaku. The characteristics of its unique objective and its deadlines set this volunteer coordination method apart from others in these two business projects. We identified that the method of volunteer coordination adopted by these projects emphasizes certain particular factors (the clarification of the roles expected to be performed by volunteers, flexibility in participating in volunteer activities, long-term side-by-side assistance, and achievement-oriented strategies) that differ slightly from the features inherent to more conventional methods of volunteer coordination. In this paper, the volunteer activities organized using such methods are referred to as citizen participation projects, and volunteers' motives for participating in them are examined in light of the contemporary social environment. The findings of the study indicate that citizen participation projects provide intermediary organizations with the potential to generate new opportunities, such as reconstructing volunteer program frameworks and building networks of new stakeholders.

How is it possible to support the homeless in the face of the coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic? This paper examines the homeless support activities of the NPO Sendai Yomawari Group as a case study, and discusses what decisions the NPOs made and how they carried out homeless support activities based on those decisions. We identified the vulnerabilities and challenges of NPOs revealed by the COVID-19 pandemic. At the same time, the strong sense of mission of NPO and the empathy of the staff have led to innovative ideas and initiatives overcoming the crisis.

This paper approached from two perspectives, community cafe theory and empathy theory, in order to clarify the characteristic elements of "Comachiplus" where various social capitals in the region gather and to provide hints to organizations that carry out similar activities. Comachi Cafe, which is the center of the business, has the potential to create interaction between staff and users, as well as between users, as a place for dialogue and whereabouts. Awareness of "dialogue" is characteristic as a basis for creating "accidentality" and "interaction". "Self-disclosure" and "understanding of others" are repeated after the psychological safety is guaranteed. For participants with some kind of pain, it also has an element of "recovery" and is an opportunity to objectively look at their own ownership. And two elements of the limited 〈region〉 of Totsuka Ward and the 〈children〉 which has a strong relationship with the region due to mobility restrictions, strengthen the "commonality", "contact" and "process" that are empathy mediators. It has succeeded in involving the local people through a synergistic effect. Furthermore, it is being developed as a circularity that is different from scale-out.