Recently, Japan's local employment policy has evolved, promoting cooperation between industrial policy and welfare policy. This change has resulted not only because of changes in the Japanese employment system but also because of rising concern for the quality of life among Japanese workers. The emergence of a new type of labor market intermediary and of vocational training deserves to be noted in this evolution. There is a possibility that the comprehensive development of local employment policy will promote changes in the Japanese employment system and lay a sustainable foundation for community life.

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The aim of this article is to provide a rough sketch of how the coming health care system looks like from the perspective of the theory of the hospital century (Ikai [2010]). The article concludes with the following three findings: 1) the change in the basic concept of health, from a scientific medicine basis to a quality of life basis, will require a more comprehensive and more community-based health care system, 2) this change in the concept of the field of health care can be understood in the broader context of the drastic changes in social policy over the past thirty years, and 3) establishing a comprehensive, community-based health care system will require resolving a new set of problems, such as finding means of coordinating various health care professionals, strengthening social capital, and controlling health care costs.

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A regional community is a structurally multi-layered place of production, labor, and life, it has become more urgent that the community manage its region autonomously and comprehensively. The ultimate aim of the community is to improve the quality of life, and it should, under the global economy, tackle various tasks such as industrial promotion, job creation, and establishing foundations for better lives. There are some clues about how to solve these difficult problems. A knowledge-oriented economy places high value on non-material entities such as history, culture, and knowledge, which are supposedly created by the people and by connections among people. In other words, human capital and social capital have become increasingly important. Accumulating local talents and establishing close ties among them are especially important for regional development. The regional community is to be expected to formulate its own system, generating a virtuous circle in which various elements such as industrial promotion, employment, and the quality of life become mutually enhancing. Only irreplaceable resources based on regional characteristics have the potential to bring sustainable development to the region.

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Comparative studies of welfare states make a point of classifying welfare states that are already formed, and have not been considered them in historical perspective. In this paper, I develop a new type of welfare state classification based on family policy doctrines. Since the end of the nineteen century, population problems arose throughout Europe, as future declines in population were presaged by declining birthrates. In each country, professionals and statesmen discussed what family policies to adopt. This is why postwar welfare state models were established. This paper examines Sweden, France, and Britain. In Sweden, the low birth rate has given rise to many policies which gave a priority to social security systems for individuals. In France, the government has developed family policies that considered parents and children as a unit in order to cope with population problems. In Britain, it is held that the nation should not intervene in family life, and, as a result, demographic issues were not linked to family policies. Each country continues to maintain different welfare state types dating from the interwar period.

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In this paper, I will clarify ideas and approaches that influenced welfare state formation in Japan by extracting various currents of welfare state theory of 1950s conservatives. The Liberal Democratic Party formed in 1955 advocated a "welfare state" in a general plan, and supporters of this idea were Diet members of the Improvement Party and of the Nobusuke Kishi faction of the Liberal Party. They placed strong importance on the welfare states of Europe and America as models, valued social security, and formed universal medical insurance and pension systems. In contrast, Tanzan Ishibashi and Hayato Ikeda considered Britain to be a negative model, regarded social security as a negative policy, and regarded expansion of production as a positive policy. This approach hovered in the background of high economic growth policy. In this paper, the latter is defined as a production approach different from any of three approaches (liberal, conservative, and social democratic) of Esping-Andersen.

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This paper examines change in the health care system in the first half of 20^<th> century in France, focusing on the influence of the two World Wars. The institutional framework of health care was changed, first from a mutual aid society to a mandatory health insurance system after World War I, and then with the creation of a second health insurance system inside the new social security system after World War II. In order to understand this evolution, the paper focuses on the examination of the movements of both mutual aid societies and the medical association, the institutions concerned with health care during this period. This paper presents two main ideas. First, there is an important discontinuity between the natures of the two health insurance systems. Second, the two World Wars had a strong influence on the timing of the establishment of both health insurance systems, and on their discontinuous natures.

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Recently there are many countries that allow migrant caregivers to work. They are categorized in four areas -Europe, North America, the Middle East, and Southeast Asia- and can be classified by the codes specifying decreasing population, aging society, immigration policy, and flesh trading. The classified pattern determines the policy applied to foreign workers of accepting countries. Thus the content of these policies (particularly the application of labor laws) strongly influences migrant workers' labor conditions and real living standards. In addition, countries of origin are categorized as areas of East Europe, North Africa, or Southeast Asia, and the classifying codes are poverty and flesh trading. The international labor market of caregivers has expanded in accordance with market conditions, and is brokered by international agencies. NGOs strongly advocate acceptance of caregiver migrant workers. This study will cover these various points, including government policies (in the Philippines and Taiwan), and examine the direction of the advocacy groups that determine the acceptance of migrant caregivers.

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