In the common theme session, three speakers reported on the past, present and future of youth issues, drawing on the results of their fieldwork research. For comments on these reports, please refer to the contributions of Kimiko Kimoto, who served as a commentator for the journal of this academic society. In addition, participants in the common theme session expressed a wide range of questions and opinions regarding their current understanding of youth issues, their evaluation of the efforts of national and local governments, and research methods. Has the nature of the “youth” problem changed over the past 30 years ? If it has, it would be necessary to trace the changes in the labor market, companies, local communities, and governments, including local governments, that embody that nature. What is required of social policy as a policy in the new situation regarding the reality it must confront and the direction of policy ? The debate shall continue.

This paper elucidates the current state of research on the employment ice age generation, who graduated during the economic downturn from the late 1990s to the early 2000s, using an online interview survey conducted with 20 participants in 2023. The career difficulties faced by the ice age generation did not manifest merely as a continuous series of nonregular employment. Even among those who started working full time upon graduation, many began their careers in jobs with poor working conditions. There are also numerous cases in which individuals, despite having full-time work experience, left full-time positions multiple times, oscillated between full-time and non-regular employment, or experienced periods of unemployment. In this paper, we refer to such career trajectories as “yo-yo careers.”

Current support for the ice age generation primarily focuses on redistributive efforts aimed at securing full-time employment or employment in general. However, it is also necessary to engage in ongoing discussions on the social recognition of the existential experiences of those who struggle to find a place in society. Furthermore, there is a need to explore strategies to convey this issue as a continuous problem that extends to younger generations rather than merely as a generational issue unique to a particular era.

Since the 2010s, the longstanding issue of youth employment has improved. However, the population decline, Tokyo’s overconcentration, and low economic growth have emerged as critical national challenges. The government mobilized the youth to address these issues, but there were no signs of a solution to the problem. Although many young people desire to move to regional areas, it requires a high degree of agency. Many individuals in the regional areas wish to marry and raise children. However, establishing a sufficient economic foundation for achieving these goals is challenging. Consequently, the government’s efforts to mobilize the youth have encountered macro-level boycotts. This boycott was possible because decisions regarding marriage, childbirth, and place of residence were left to individual freedom.

Social policies have evolved to address problems caused by capitalism. Sustained efforts are necessary to create new theories and policies to address current issues stemming from economic and social contraction and stagnation.

When discussing social policy issues during the transition from youth to adulthood, it is necessary to determine whether this occurs in the cyclical or structural aspects of a capitalist society. This paper focuses on the social class, especially the “non-elite” young people who have difficulty finding prospects for management and professional careers due to their occupational background. It analyzes how the employment problems they face in the process of transitioning to adulthood are recognized as policy issues and a path to solving them is formed. First, I will introduce Osaka Prefecture’s “Industry-Government-Academia Platform Concept” and “Diversity Promotion Project” as the local government projects that promote matching with local SME （Small and Medium Enterspires）. Second, I will introduce the efforts of a free school in Kyoto Prefecture’s “Comprehensive Support Project for Youth Employment and Settlement”. Through an analysis of these projects and initiatives, I will discuss the functions and challenges of the “labor market （labor） intermediary agencies” that work with young people, who are job seekers and recruiting companies in the local labor market to eliminate the mismatch.

This paper is a transcription of my oral presentation as discussant for the plenary session of the 148th Biannual Conference of JASPS entitled “The Trajectory of Youth Issues in Japan ：Their past, present, and future”, upon the request of the research planning committee of JASPS. First, I reflect on the trends in youth and youth studies until 2004. Second, my discussion focuses on the experience of the so-called “employment ice age” generation, with an emphasis on the perspective of inter-generational and intra-generational relations. Finally, my questions and comments on the three presenters of this plenary session are provided in accordance with the above-stated perspective.

Welfare policies for people with disabilities have recently been reformed through the introduction of a market system. Support centers for continuous employment type A were established as a mixture of public welfare services and ordinary businesses, providing the necessary job training, support, and employment opportunities to connect people with disabilities to ordinary jobs. However, balancing welfare and business ethics remains challenging. Therefore, using managerial data, we analyzed the performance of support centers for type A continuous employment in terms of workers’ wages, income and expenditure differences, profit margins, and the transition to regular employment. We studied the determinants of business performance by considering business location, ownership, productive activities, welfare service features, and so on.

The field of employment support for persons with disabilities as both workers and welfare service users aims to achieve a society in which people with and people without disabilities can work together by combining labor and welfare initiatives. Society will serve as a model of labor policy in the future.

Support centers for continuous employment type A are necessary for employing people, who have difficulty getting jobs at general business facilities when they compete with general workers in a competitive labor market, Detailed regulations, however, are not set for their operation, and work training programs and the actual state of their operation and their support are not clearly known. Consequently, the author conducted interview research for business owners of Type A Centers satisfying the designated standard under the Act on Comprehensive Services and Support for Persons with Disabilities in rural and urban areas to clarify the actual state of operation and support by the Type A Centers, the position of Type A Centers in the employment support system for persons with disabilities, and the structure of Type A Centers for effective operation in accordance with location characteristics.

The report clarifies the following three points based on the analysis result of Type A Centers in rural areas.

According to the Osaka Prefectural Board of Education （1999） “Educational Reform Program,” which provides a long-term policy outlook, there were 155 prefectural full-time high schools, 29 part-time, and 1 correspondence. As this distribution suggests, correspondence courses were of low priority. It was not until the 2012 school year that a proposal for substantive restructuring and expansion of the course was made. Six years later, in 2018, a proposal to enhance the use of external specialists in the course was made, and the allocation of SSWs and the expansion of budget hours for career counselors have finally progressed.

For a long time, students with various difficulties have been enrolled in correspondence courses, and guidance and support for their careers, especially employment, has continued to be an important issue. Why has it been delayed for so long ? The study elucidates the structure of this incrementalism by contextualizing the correspondence course within the policies of Osaka Prefectural high schools since the 1990s and then conceptualizes the collaboration formed in the process as a “community of program implementation.”

This study clarifies the actual situation of employment guidance and support at the Osaka Prefectural Correspondence High School and examines related issues. Its grade/class structure, curriculum, and teacher organization, which are vastly different from those of full-time schools, do not mesh well with the detailed process necessary for employment through school placement. Students with different graduation years were enrolled in each grade from first to eighth year, and job-seekers were unevenly distributed. Class times vary ; therefore, teachers have few opportunities to meet each other. Furthermore, high school teachers are less aware of classroom management than elementary and junior high school teachers. At the same time, many students have difficulty using school placement services. For these reasons, it is difficult for homeroom teachers to take the lead in interacting with students who wish to find employment and coordinate with career guidance departments as in full-time schools. The principal’s leadership function is important, but insufficient to increase the effectiveness of employment guidance and support. The school has been working guarantee a career path beyond learning by functioning in a distributed leadership system that includes teachers and external parties.

This study aims to clarify the practices and interactions in which the various actors constituting the local labor market support the employment of public high school correspondence course students and to make a tentative argument for a new model describing the recruitment of new high school graduates.

For a long time, recruiting new high school graduates has been understood as the “employment through school” model based on “performance relations,” that is, a screening model based on on-campus selection. However, this model has now lost its cogency, and a new model must be developed, especially for employment in high schools without sufficient resources such as correspondence high schools. In this study, we examine the ways in which each actor supports the employment of new high school graduates through interviews with various actors in the local labor market. The concluding section presents the possibility of constructing an “asset exchange model that differs from the conventional screening model.”

This paper investigates the “white collarization of blue-collar workers,” focusing on systems of promotion from within. Prior studies have suggested that blue-collar workers in Japan have a higher chance of promotions than those in other countries due to the characteristics of the Japanese employment system in terms of the nearness in compensation between blue- and white-collar workers. However, whether internal promotion systems are widely used among blue-collar workers in Japan has not been closely examined, as prior studies of promotion-from-within systems in blue-collar workers in Japan have primarily been based on indirect data or case studies.

To determine whether the findings of earlier studies can apply to the Japanese labor market, this paper drew data from the social stratification and social mobility surveys at four time points between 1965 and 1995 and clarified two points. ⑴ The promotion probability of blue-collar workers employed at large firms has decreased in later cohorts. ⑵ The effect of job tenure on promotions was essentially nonexistent. These findings indicates that in Japan, promotion-from-within systems for blue-collar workers differed from those for white-collar workers. Thus, this paper concludes that prior research has overemphasized promotion-from-within systems in Japan.

Based on the policies of a community-based society and ageing in place, social welfare services are increasingly provided to enable users’ continuity and independence in daily life in their homes. However, when losing a home, individuals and families are offered temporary accommodation, which, in the case of large cities, often causes relocation（s） beyond local government borders. Given the gap between the philosophy of living in place and homelessness responses, this study examined relocation practices within the public homelessness support system in central Tokyo and the factors contributing to such practices. Questionnaire surveys and interviews with welfare officers from 18 special wards in Tokyo revealed that most people without housing were provided temporary accommodation under public assistance. Long-distance relocations frequently occurred when private low-cost lodging facilities were secured for this purpose. Relocations beyond local government borders were driven by welfare offices using organisations that ran many facilities in widespread locations to secure accommodation, and by the shrinking accommodation capacity in central Tokyo due to stricter regulations on low-cost lodging facilities.

This study empirically analyzes double care in China using large-scale data （CHARLS2018）. It highlights the prevalent pattern of caring for grandchildren while simultaneously supporting elderly parents, starting with childcare needs. Additionally, middle-aged women who are self-employed, farmers, or otherwise able to adjust their time easily bear significant caregiving responsibilities. Furthermore, middle-aged women cannot escape their double care responsibilities even if their offspring work in stable occupations, such as large enterprises or in the public sector. There is a disparity in the social welfare received depending on the household registration system and occupation in the labor market, while the social security systems of pensions and medical care are weak guarantees for the elderly. Double care in China should be interpreted within the context of population movements from rural to urban areas and from small to large cities, the structure of the labor market, and the redistribution of care responsibilities arising from social security and household registration systems. The challenge is to examine double care as a common social risk in East Asia through a social policy study.