This is the lead report for "Local Community and the Seismic Disaster at Fukushima Nuclear Plant," the theme of the general session of the 124th Conference of the Society for the Study of Social Policy. The Great East Japan Earthquake and Tepco's Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant accident on March 11, 2011, caused an unprecedented nuclear power disaster. The heavy radiation contamination hit local communities hard, forcing the evacuation of more than 150,000 people from their homes. The Society for the Study of Social Policy had not previously tackled the nuclear power problem head on. After some serious soul-searching, now more than ever it is time to use our expertise to tackle this issue, help those affected, revitalize the affected communities, and move toward a society free of nuclear power. This paper will discuss how we have dealt with nuclear power and how we must confront the issue of nuclear power as a research topic. It will explain the objectives of the general session, outline the gist of each report and then make comments. Finally, the paper will propose the challenges we should tackle.

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The catastrophe at Tepco's Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant has been a terrible blow to all of Fukushima Prefecture. About 70% of the prefecture has become contaminated beyond the level of "radiation control zones," while municipalities within 20 kilometers of the power plant face the real possibility of extinction. Some 160,000 Fukushima residents have been forced to live as refugees in and outside the prefecture, and more than 1,000 leave the prefecture each month. The number of victims of the nuclear power plant is just the tip of the iceberg, as there were earthquake and tsunami victims who could have been saved had the nuclear accident not happened, 761 people who died of causes indirectly related to the earthquake, and a surge in those subsequently certified as requiring nursing care. Meanwhile, the fight continues against radiation, with rising exposure to workers striving to resolve the crisis and conducting slow-going decontamination efforts. Today we endeavor to demand justice from those responsible for the Tepco Fukushima Nuclear Power Plant accident, to seek support for exposed prefectural residents through special legislation and to study, record and communicate the toll. Our future demands a break from nuclear power and does not brook a restarting of the plants.

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Conflict has arisen between those who have convinced themselves it is all right to stay in Fukushima and those who have not, due to the cover-up after the earthquake and to the prefecture's campaign to raise the level of exposure considered safe to 100 millisieverts. This has caused mental health problems, with opinions divided in the home, at the workplace and in the community. With at least 75% of schools in the prefecture situated in "radiation control zones," the central government's decision to permit use of schools with radiation levels as high as 20 millisieverts has caused an increase in unnecessary exposure. Local governments push responsibility off on each other, municipalities and the prefecture claiming they are helpless without instruction from the prefecture and the central government respectively. Panicked parents on May 1, 2011, launched the "Fukushima Network for Saving Children from Radiation." They began decontamination operations to make up for delayed efforts by the authorities and established citizen radiation measurement centers. They are engaged in a wide range of activities to protect children, including providing information, helping with evacuation and recuperation, holding lectures and health consultation events, and opening the "Vegetable Cafe Hamoru" to provide safe vegetables.

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The residents of Iitate Village were forced to evacuate because of the Fukushima nuclear plant accident that followed the Great East Japan Earthquake. This paper explores the following points, paying attention to the policymaking process before and after the evacuation. Firstly, this paper attempts to reveal the collisions and entanglements currently occurring among the Iitate government office and refugees from Iitate Village. Secondly, it also attempts to examine the relationship between the present situation and the structure of the local autonomy system in Japan. Iitate Village developed the resident self-government a quarter century ago in order to deal more effectively with longtime administrative problems that resulted from disagreements from the former villages that existed before the Village was created by merger in the Showa era. This policy has produced local leaders and promoted political participation by residents. However, this situation had gradually deteriorated by 2000. The problem, aggravated since 3.11, means that the village has engaged in negotiations with the national government and the voices of the refugees have been ignored.

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"The Progress of material, artificial civilization casts society into darkness. Electricity is discovered and the world is darkened." Shozo Tanaka wrote this in his diary just before his death. This entry cuts to the essence of Tepco's Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power accident. When Japan eked out a victory in the Russo-Japanese War and began to electrify society in earnest, Tanaka asked if there exists a philosophy that uses electricity as a symbol of civilization. In the face of serious mineral poisoning brought on by the rapid modernization of the Ashio Copper Mine, he stressed the importance of morality to control technology from the perspective of nature and life as opposed to overreliance on knowledge. The unprecedented nuclear power accident that occurred along with the March 11 Great East Japan Earthquake has infused Tanaka's warnings with new relevance. Crisis and uncertainty remain today twenty months on. Over 160,000 people are forced to live as refugees. Radioactive contamination of vast swaths of Fukushima Prefecture should cause alarm and has caused anxiety for our children's future. A mountain of unresolved problems remain, including employment, compensation claims, health care, migration, radiation exposure to workers, and disposing of contaminated soil, making Tepco's Fukushima nuclear power accident the gravest pollution disaster since the Ashio Copper Mine Incident and the Minamata mercury spill.

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Political ideas and proposals, which hardly reflect the feelings of the people in the disaster areas, have caused confusion. In the symposium, the three reporters emphasized that the victims themselves are the core of the reconstruction work teams. We need to establish this viewpoint in order to investigate, analyze, and record the disaster and reconstruction-process. The earthquake also raised many problems for non-disaster areas. In urban areas, numerous "Kitaku nanmin" (refugees who cannot return home) are stranded because of disruptions to the transport system. Decline of the region with potential tsunami risk is progressing. We need to keep our eyes on the new policy challenges.

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The earthquake that struck northeastern Japan on 11 March 2011 and the subsequent tsunami and nuclear disasters have wrought damage on a scale both larger and of a different nature from that of the 1995 Kobe earthquake. In Fukushima Prefecture in particular, over 150,000 people remain evacuated, with more than 60,000 of these taking refuge outside their home prefecture. At the time of this survey, six months after the multiple disasters, victims were facing extraordinary challenges with a) the breadth of the evacuee diaspora, b) the undetermined duration of this evacuation and c) the variety of forms this evacuation has taken, not to mention stress from isolation and worry. Survey responses collected in September 2011 from villagers and townspeople forcibly evacuated from 8 towns and villages in the Futaba region shed light on the difficulties people continue to face, and are the focus of this study. Even after 18 months of reconstruction, several barriers remain in achieving job and financial security. Japan can learn, from the experiences of other countries around the world, how to provide effective support based on respect for individuals, with a view toward eventual autonomy.

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The 3.11 earthquake and tsunami is classified as "catastrophe". Community structures were heavily damaged, local governing institutions are unable to operate properly, nearby municipalities cannot provide much assistance, and almost all everyday community and social functions have been disrupted. In addition, a series of man-made errors, especially the Fukushima nuclear accident, made the natural catastrophe all the more disruptive, bringing levels of grief, distrust, and exclusion remarkable in the history of natural disasters. This paper describes, first, the serious process of the lives of the victims since the disaster in terms of an uneasy psycho-social perspective towards the future, of senseless policy planning and the facing of local governments to hard realities, and of macro-economic path-dependent means of allocating material resources for reconstruction. Then the necessity of human security norms in the process of recovery and reconstruction of lives is addressed, together with an alternative economic strategy of de-growth (de-emphasizing dependence on economic growth) to invite local inhabitants and the victims into participatory and mutually designed visions/processes.

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Prof. Hiromichi Nishimura made important contributions to the development of the Society for the Study of Social Policy in postwar Japan. He tackled major issues such as controversies about the nature of social policy and the development of theory on social policy. In addition, he played a leading role in making the Society for the Study of Social Policy one of Japan's leading research associations. It seems that we have had few opportunities to refer to social policy theories, including those developed by Prof. Nishimura, in the second half of the 20th century. We should bear in mind that we continue to study the works of Prof. Nishimura because of the insights they provide for pursuing a vision of 21st century social policy. This special issue focuses on Prof. Nishimura so as to identify the place of his contributions in the development of Japanese social policy research.

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Prof. Nishimura was a leading academic who devoted himself to the Society for the Study of Social Policy in postwar Japan. Thus, it is important to have an understanding of his life works. Although today we rarely refer to earlier controversies about the nature of social policy, they were crucial points of reference for Prof. Nishimura. As a result, he completed his unique theory of social policy and it remained robust for many years. Prof. Nishimura also energetically conducted research on labor welfare assistance. In addition, we should pay attention to his deep commitment to the Society for the Study of Social Policy. Most importantly, Prof. Nishimura devoted great energy to ensuring that local branches of the Society for the Study of Social Policy were maintained. This has enabled us to hold our conference twice a year. Prof. Nishimura was also a poet, and we can recall his life through his poetry.

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This paper discusses the contributions of the late Hiromichi Nishimura to theories of social and labor polices in order to further develop this thought. Nishimura reviewed the discussions up to the 1980s to point out the significance of state theory, but he did not develop his own theory. Here, I have proposed my own: the spiral theory of social and labor policies, which are measures conducted by the state to resolve social problems. The spiral theory consists of two parts: structural theory and historical theory. The two theories are connected by social norms which are embedded in the policies. The spiral theory analyzes the structure and the historical change of the policies to discover the nature of the state. The norms embedded in the policies are now changed from the merit-based egalitarianism of the 20th-century welfare state to the merit-free egalitarianism of the 21st-century welfare society.

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The method of debating the way of life at the Society for the Study of Social Policy has seen a number of turning points. Before the 1980s, the mainstream debate method was to point out inadequate living conditions. However, when we entered the 1990s, the individualization of life moved forward through the development of livelihood security, and lifestyle issues came to be discussed together with individualization. It was the late member Nishimura who spearheaded these discussions. A common technique in the debating methods up to the beginning of the 21st century was debating living conditions and issues from a macro perspective. More recently, however, a method of resolution based on the problems of persons concerned with living issues has been raised by member Ikai. In this article, the questions posed by member Nishimura and member Ikai will be organized as macro life theory and micro life theory, and the significance and relationship of the two will be made clear. In addition, we would like to show that as current interest shifts from living changes to life relationships, social policies related to livelihoods are being differentiated with regard to livelihood security and livelihood support.

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This paper reviews recent studies of the living conditions of the elderly and the Social Security system in order to clarify issues related to income security and public pensions. First, I investigate studies that analyze various government statistics or Minimum Income Standard research. These studies analyze the actual living conditions of the elderly from the perspectives of both income and living costs and show that a large proportion of elder persons lives in poverty. Second, I investigate studies that analyze reforms of the public pension system, which are related to the "blank period" between retirement age and the pension eligibility age. Furthermore, there have been people without pension benefits and people with lower pension benefits but it is difficult for the elderly to find employment. These studies show that there are fears that many of the elderly may face livelihood issues in years to come. Third, I point out studies that criticize the reforms of the public pension system from the ideal of social security. As a result of these research reviews, it turned out that recent studies indicate the importance of providing a series of "Livelihood Security" systems rather than a simple "income security" system.

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This paper examines the prospect of transforming labor unions in Japan through a review of research on organizing activities of non-regular employees by enterprise unions and studies of community unions. We found the following facts. Though many of cases of organizing activities of non-regular employees by enterprise unions were aimed at maintaining the Japanese style of industrial relations, which has often been regarded as extremely cooperative, in several cases such activities created tensions between unions and managements. On the other hand, though many researchers have focused on community unions in Japan as groups to support struggling individual workers, organizations involved in "Social Movement Unionism", or institutions as public goods, some community unions which succeed in organizing emphasize the crucial role of workplace-based collective action. These facts suggest that there is still a possibility of union revitalization based on workplace-based collective action in Japan.

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In recent years, the amount of medical assistance has rapidly increased, and the government has proposed policies to reduce outlays and encourage the discharge of long-term inpatients. However, the amount of medical assistance per capita has tended to decrease, a trend that has not been adequately studied. This article analyzes the determinants of levels of medical assistance by using panel-data at the prefecture level. The results show that rising rates of longterm psychiatric inpatients have increased the amount of the medical assistance per capita. It suggests that policies to encourage the discharge of long-term psychiatric inpatients have been effective reducing outlays on medical assistance. However, we need to carefully examine from medical and social perspectives in deciding whether this policy is truly beneficial.

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