Selection of the Study Site

Japan has only two types of congregate housing for the aged: welfare homes and emerging retirement communities (see Chapter 5). There is no public housing for low-income elderly, no Sun City-type large-scale developments or mobile home parks, as in the United States.

The selection of Fuji-no-Sato as the setting of this study was based on six considerations:

1. Type of service and type of payment

2. Attitude toward community creation

3. Size

4. Newness of the community

5. Size and philosophy of the management organization

6. Visibility as a model for other communities

When we began this study, there were only thirty-one retirement communities in all of Japan, but both the number and the variety have since grown rapidly and will continue to do so. Fuji-no-Sato is a life-care retirement community, the most common and, for now, the most promising type. A life-care community is defined here as a facility that provides, through contract, both age-appropriate living accommodations and at least some skilled nursing care as needed for the duration of the resident's life. The other two types of retirement communities in Japan are the "life-guarantee" type (of which there are only a few) and the condominium. The vast majority of elderly live either independently or with children, or they are confined to hospitals if chronically ill. When the study began, there was a great vacuum in housing options between these extremes; now many new age-specific communities are established yearly. We discuss the Japanese retirement housing environment in detail in Chapter 5.

The life-care type and the life-guarantee type offer similar services, but differ in payment method. The residents in the former pay a monthly fee in addition to an entrance fee; those in the latter make a one-time lump sum payment intended to cover expenses until they die. As one would expect, the life-guarantee type is vulnerable to unexpected costs, and the Ministry of Health and Welfare has discouraged them since one went into bankruptcy.

Condominiums are essentially residential facilities for independent elderly and provide only minimal medical and health care services; residents have to leave when they become frail and cannot maintain independent living.

Life care is increasingly important because it seems to address effectively the two main problems that have led to the emergence of retirement communities in the first place: (1) societal changes in the living arrangements of the aged and in consciousness regarding filial expectations and filial responsibilities and (2) the insufficiency of the long-term care system for the dependent aged.

The social dynamics of this type of community are the focus of our study. It is particularly significant that Fuji-no-Sato was the only retirement community in Japan that placed strong emphasis

on community creation by the residents. This was an explicit goal from its planning stage and is expressed in the architectural design of the community (see Chapter 6).

In terms of size, Fuji-no-Sato has an average full-time population of two hundred thirty to two hundred fifty. Thus, it is a face-to-face community and appears to be an appropriate size for the residents to get to know one another.

The timing of the study was also crucial. Fuji-no-Sato opened in May 1979 and had been in operation for three years and four months when Kinoshita began fieldwork. It achieved full occupancy at the end of the first year. The research was well timed to focus on the process of community creation.

We deliberately chose a nonprofit community, feeling that the various financial positions of the variety of for-profit builders would complicate our study. Fuji-no-Sato was built and is managed by the largest nonprofit organization in this industry, having six large-scale life-care retirement communities. In 1982, when the study began, the corporation had four communities, whose combined population accounted for about 20 percent of the total in Japanese retirement communities.

What we did not realize at the outset was that this company has a unique philosophy, which turned out to have major consequences for the social dynamics of its communities. The builders were advocating something called "new welfare for the middle-income elderly."

The word "welfare" has an ambiguous meaning in Japan today that reflects changing and uncertain social attitudes. On the one hand, welfare still retains the idea, held over from the preprosperity era, of public support for the needy—those who cannot take care of themselves. Strong stigma is attached to those "on welfare"—low-income people who receive financial support. On the other hand, welfare also has the newer, more general, and less pejorative meaning of "public well-being"—people's right to receive various social services. The government has been successful in providing many such services.

Against this background, the builders of Fuji-no-Sato advocate "welfare" in the newer sense for the middle-income elderly, a welfare essentially based on contract. (See also Chapter 8.) Their philosophy, however, contains two important innovations: a greater

role for the nonprofit private sector in supplying essential services and the introduction of individual payments for these services. The idea superficially resembles the familiar American practice of buying essential services in an open market; but in the Japanese context, the nature of this contract is quite different.

In planning Fuji-no-Sato, a guideline set the amount of the entrance fee within the range of the lump sum retirement payment the average middle-income worker would receive and the monthly fee within the average monthly retirement pension. Particularly important for this study was the fact that Fuji-no-Sato was intended to house not the affluent, but the middle-income elderly.

Lastly, Fuji-no-Sato is still one of the most successful and best known retirement communities in Japan. It has full occupancy, with sixty to eighty people constantly on the waiting list. Many other retirement communities are suffering from low occupancy rates. The development organization has a highly sophisticated long-term fiscal management scheme and has established itself as a leader in this industry by providing management know-how to new developers. Furthermore, Fuji-no-Sato has been covered extensively in the press and electronic media, including foreign newspapers such as the New York Times .