Featured article from Global Newsletter June 2026
Written by Hiroaki Sonoda. Social Welfare corporation Tōrin-kai, Vice President. Social Welfare corporation Hōyu-fukushikai, President
1.Purpose and Background of This article
The year 2026 will be one in which numerous international events occur that make us conscious of the framework of the nation-state. Beginning with the recent Winter Olympics, there will be the World Baseball Classic, and the FIFA World Cup will be held from June. These events can also be recognized as transcending national boundaries and could be said to symbolize globalization. In particular, the globalization of markets is expanding relentlessly; U.S. interest rate hikes and attacks on Iran are affecting currencies and stock prices around the world, and phenomena such as "various events in the world shaking the global economy" are increasingly visible. As market globalization, which prioritizes free competition, progresses, the separation of winners and losers is advancing, and various disparities are continuing to widen both domestically and internationally. Values based on nationalism seem to be, behind the glamorous sports events, also becoming seeds for various wars and conflicts.philosophy, points out the fragility of the concept of 'independence' as idealized by the state or globalization. He also highlights the positive significance of 'dependence,' which is pushed to the opposite of independence, and draws attention to it as essential for solving contemporary social issues.
In the modern era, where the nation and the planet take precedence, where should welfare be headed in order to address the challenges of society? As for previous studies to explore answers to these strategic questions, I would first like to approach this topic from political philosophy. Simply said, political philosophy is a discipline that fundamentally questions 'how humans should live together,' and welfare, which is guided by the ideal of living together, can gain hints about how it should progress in the future. In this context, the renowned political philosopher Michael Sandel (2020) emphasizes the importance of creating the common good (the values and purposes that make the society we live in better) within communities, as a critique of leaving too much to the state or the market. In addition, Negri and Hardt (2000) argue that it is necessary to oppose the power of globalization that goes beyond the state, conceptualized as 'Empire,' using the force of the 'Common,' in which heterogeneous others unite in solidarity. Furthermore, Jin Sato (2020, 2023) of the University of Tokyo's Institute for Advanced Studies on Asia, who specializes in practical international relations more than in political
Additionally, Sato positions high-quality sources of dependence in civil society as 'intermediate groups' and expresses expectations that social welfare organizations can sufficiently fulfill this function as well. Their assertions converge on the question of how to create and utilize communities that can remain at a distance from the state and the market. To say it without fear, the state and the market are the very entities that have reduced welfare to a 'device for individual support' and destroyed communities. The 'independence' that Japanese society has revered has, in effect, become a silent imposition of 'do not trouble anyone,' and the greatest fiction that has led to the collapse of communities.
Following this article, we will introduce two practical examples by Japanese social welfare corporations, and they also feel similar challenges in their local communities. The welfare practices of the Michinoku-Daijukai in Iwate Prefecture and the Kurushima-kai in Ehime Prefecture can be said to be the development of their respective local communities. Currently, in Japan, mutual aid relationships such as family ties, helping neighbors, and neighborhood associations have become notably weak, and cooperative organizations based on elementary and junior high school districts are also being dissolved or abolished. In 2022, a symbolic incident occurred in which a mother and child died of starvation in isolation. While the suspension of public assistance was also a factor in this incident, it suggests that there are a certain number of people in modern Japan who, unable to rely on the government, relatives, or neighbors, suffer from hunger in solitude. It is hard to capture to what extent this hunger problem exists, but a report reveals that more than 2,000 people die of malnutrition each year.
In economically prosperous Japan, one might wonder why this is happening, but this gap can also be seen as evidence that the aversion to 'relying on others (dependence)' is more widespread in Japanese society than we might imagine. Considering these social backgrounds, the challenges of Japan's social welfare are such that addressing individual problems alone is truly like 'pouring water on a burning stone,' and it has reached a point where efforts must also include the revival of communities where residents can rely on each other. According to Eiji Oguma of Keio University (2019, 2024), the cause of the collapse of this community lies in the fact that Japanese society has underestimated the power of communities that had been steadily built over 300 years during the Edo period, treated them as practically worthless, and neglected to devote labor and funds necessary to maintain them. In addition, Oguma warns that if the collapse of this community is ignored any longer, Japanese society will fall into an irreparable vicious cycle.
Therefore, the topic addressed in this article is a consideration of strategies aimed at revitalizing communities by welfare organizations. In order to propose strategies that can actually be implemented, attention will be focused on 'who (the actor)' and 'what (the objective)' should be addressed.
2. Who is the agent that changes the community?
First, in exploring the nature of the entities responsible for community transformation, I would like to introduce the assertions of the anthropologist Robin Dunbar. Dunbar (1998, 2014) studies the relationship in which the structural constraints of the brain, specifically the capacity of the neocortex, have greatly influenced the nature of human communities. Dunbar is also a global authority who scientifically demonstrated the limits of social relationships that humans can manage. This assertion forms the foundational knowledge for Harari's (2015) claim that the root of cooperative relationships in human history lies in the ability to create fictions. Dunbar, using the numbers 5, 15, 50, and 150 as benchmarks, proposed the 'law of organization and numbers' as shown in Table 1. Therefore, in this article, based on Dunbar's argument, as shown in Figure 1, we recognize that the first layer of communities, premised on intimacy with roughly 5 to 30 people, and the second layer, which is a community of roughly 50 to 150 people that can cooperate stably, are the entities capable of driving the transformation of the overall regional community. What is important here is that creating intimate communities in the first layer is the breakthrough for improving welfare in Japan. This is because Japan's existing welfare system has been designed under the principle of 'individual independence,' covering nursing care, support for people with disabilities, and childcare, and has hardly ever assumed treating the regional 'community' as a main entity. As a counterargument, some may claim that Japan's welfare system includes keywords such as the 'Community-based Integrated Care System' and the 'Multi-layered Support System,' but these remain merely ideological concepts and cannot be said to consider a Dunbar number of 150 people. What is important is to generate ideas that mobilize some kind of community based on intimacy in the first layer, and to appeal and share their concrete significance within the face-to-face relationships of the second layer of local residents. Only from there does it become possible to work on the entire local community. Furthermore, constructing multiple overlapping communities of about 50 to 150 people within the entire region will likely become a critical success factor for transforming society. The existing welfare system, which has not focused on communities of 150 people or fewer including local residents and welfare workers, has a 'design flaw' that ignores the structure of the human brain.
3. What should we aim for in order for the community to recover and grow?
Next, we will also consider measures to shift from the narrow concept of welfare, which aims to solve individual problems, to the broader concept of welfare, which seeks to pursue community well-being. In doing so, we want to think about what kinds of issues communities should address, besides resolving individual challenges. A summary of this consideration is found in the report of the National Association of Young Managers of Social Welfare Corporations, in which the authors participated ("Concepts and Implementation Strategies for the Future of Social Welfare: Considerations from Co-Creation Cases with Various Stakeholders in the Welfare Field"1).
As a result of analyzing cases considered pioneering in Japanese welfare practice, it became clear that they are 'crossing over' into eight areas previously thought to be unrelated to welfare— education, medical care, public health, disaster prevention, public safety, judicial affairs, arts, and cultural promotion— and are active there. The practice of Michinoku-Daijukai, introduced later, represents a crossover into the field of education. Meanwhile, the practice of Kurushima-kai represents a crossover into arts and cultural promotion. In other words, these areas are social issues at the community level, and case studies have shown that welfare organizations can make substantial contributions to them.
And these eight areas can be said to fall within the broader scope of welfare, and challenges within these areas at the community level are acts aimed at optimizing the entire region in which people live and are nothing other than acts of creating the common good as Sandel describes. It can also be said that the so-called 'common' within a community is nurtured by its residents. For example, an appropriate educational environment requires efforts from the community outside of schools to be equally important. Moreover, the expansion of policies in preventive healthcare, public health, and disaster prevention not only improves people's quality of life but also ultimately includes the common good of reducing unnecessary social security costs. The complementary role of welfare in ensuring public safety and justice can lead to a shift from attributing responsibility solely to individuals in cases involving legal issues related to elderly people with dementia or people with disabilities, toward thoroughly considering measures involving the community and society as a whole. Furthermore, promoting arts and culture in conjunction with welfare seems to expand the possibilities of creating unique art based on the diverse values of children, people with disabilities, and the elderly. Above all, by addressing challenges and advancing regional development in these eight areas, the sense of security in living in the region and the sense of belonging to it among residents who make up the community is expected to be enhanced, which may accelerate a virtuous cycle within the community.
4. Conclusion of the claim and room for future consideration
To conclude, only communities can break through the limits set by the state and the market, and welfare stands at the center of reorganizing these communities. In this process of consideration, a proposal was made that the power of eight areas where welfare should expand, and the two-layer community framework should be utilized as a welfare system. By using these analytical methods, it was possible to show the processes and options for elevating welfare from the existing concept of solving individual problems to welfare that fosters happiness within communities, which is considered a significant contribution. Moreover, these processes and options are likely to serve as strategic planning tools for transformation, tailored to the differences of each distinct welfare community.
Furthermore, the reason which leads to a clear strategy is that Japan's welfare system, as previously discussed, has become rigid because it was constructed under state leadership. Not only that, but the government’s also fiscal difficulties and elements of market principles have been easily introduced into long-term care insurance and support systems for people with disabilities, causing the state to place excessive constraints on or overly prioritize efficiency in welfare functions. The mission of welfare, which is supposed to protect people living together in local communities, has been caught up by the state and the market as a result.
In Japanese society, it is still difficult to say that the negative image of welfare has been eliminated. The improvement of social evaluation and wages for workers also faces a reality where progress is slow. The fundamental reason for this is that 'independence' is more convenient for the state and the market than 'dependence,' in terms of securing tax revenue and tolerating inequality. Nevertheless, it is clear from the increasing challenges of modern society that transformation from the local level, that is, from the actual lives of people—based on the concepts of community and the 'Common' is needed. Welfare should play the central role of this transformation.
