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Paper short abstract

This presentation focuses on Japan’s position in the emerging landscape of children’s rights by examining the national reception of the transnational children’s rights movement, particularly with regard to the 1924 Geneva Declaration.

Paper long abstract

The first part of this presentation will cover the Meiji period and the emergence of the issue of child abuse through the beginning of awareness of the problem, through calls for action and the taking of responsibility by an individual who conducted a survey of prisoners in a prison, linking delinquency and abuse in childhood. The issue of child abuse was brought to public attention through the prism of prevention, with the aim of protecting society as a whole from delinquency and crime, rather than with the aim of taking children's rights into account, as is the case today.

The second part will focus on the Taishō period and the emergence of the problem of child abuse in the public eye and the urgency of the situation, which was highlighted at the time. In addition to a change in the categories of child abuse, which now included sexual violence, research conducted by Japanese members, comparing Japan and England in terms of the handling of child abuse, was decisive in the establishment of child protection measures that followed shortly afterwards. These years marked a change, initiated by attempts at regulation by various actors, and the preconditions for the implementation of policies that emerged a few years later.

Finally, the last part will focus on the beginning of the Shōwa period and the creation of child protection, as well as the establishment of a legal framework, which was not without difficulties. In these three parts, we will see how civil society and various actors influenced the landscape of the fight against child abuse, enabling the development of not only a legal framework, but also social services tailored to a vulnerable and needy population, namely children. We will thus see more broadly how the subject of sexual violence against children itself has been understood and how the framework for combating child abuse has been formed through the creation of child protection.

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Ethnographic action research in Nagoya (2012-2024) rethinks youth outreach from supported youths' perspectives. With youth, the Centre questions outreach's purpose and shifts from crime-prevention referrals to "co-presence," where youth open and run a hub, self-governing beyond merit-based control.

Paper long abstract

Existing research on youth support has documented the techniques and outcomes of professional outreach. Yet in contemporary Japan, many children and young people remain in downtown public spaces while refusing institutionalisation and formal professional intervention, even as welfare services and risk-management frameworks expand. Research rarely centres youth-led practices in which young people assemble support themselves, and rarely treats outreach not only as a technique but as a question of governance, power, and participation.

This paper addresses this gap through a fourteen-year ethnographic action research study (2012–2024) of the National Child Welfare Centre, a community-based organisation in Nagoya founded and led by the author, a social worker and child welfare practitioner. The Centre engages annually with more than 2,000 young people, including runaway youth (e.g., Tōyoko Kids), youth with delinquency histories, survivors of sexual violence, and other marginalised participants. Rather than prioritising management, behavioural correction, or risk control, it welcomes participants not as “clients” or “patients” but as collaborators in making the place together, and decisions arise from shared lived experience rather than professional authority. Weekly outreach is anchored in the Nagoya Station West Plaza, where colourful costumes signal safety, invite contact, and soften stigma in public space. Participants value sustaining and running this community for themselves—a practice of community autonomy.

Drawing on long-term participant observation, field records, and reflexive analysis, the study shows that outreach becomes effective by going to where young people gather, listening to concerns and aspirations, and co-creating activities through which those aspirations take form. Participation is not made to “work” through compliance; trust grows through encounters and continued involvement, and shared self-governance gradually takes shape. Everyday interaction continually revises boundaries between supporter and supported, expertise and lived experience, and how responsibility is held.

The findings suggest that youth support is most sustainable when helper/helped distinctions are unsettled, participants are freed from the patient role imposed by institutional logics, and governance is replaced by shared responsibility, mutual presence, and collective care. Situated within Japanese social welfare and youth policy, this model offers a critical rethinking of youth outreach and social support beyond Japan.

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Nishinari/Kamagasaki is re-theorized as a “service hub” enabling survival at the margins. The paper theorizes “gap institutions”: patching formal welfare, building networked supports, and formalizing them through deliberative forums - producing inclusion, but also sorting and temporal discipline.

Paper long abstract

Nishinari/Kamagasaki has recently been re-theorized locally not as a “problematic district” to be corrected, but as a “Nishinari-type service hub” – a concentration of practices and institutions that make survival administratively possible for people living at the edge of work, kinship, and documentation. This paper develops an anthropological account of that hub-making through a vernacular governance concept articulated as “gap institutions” (隙間の制度).

“Gap institutions” name a three-part craft of welfare infrastructure. First, local actors modify access to formal programs – “putting geta on” existing system/institution (制度) so that people can “step into” them despite eligibility frictions. Second, they build district-specific supports (ささえあいのしくみ) that are inseparable from dense local networks – e.g., supportive housing paired with multi-actor support coordination. Third, they refuse to leave these supports in the informal “valley”, instead pushing them toward recognition and resourcing as proper system/institution.

Methodologically, the paper reads “service hub” capacity not as an abstract policy label but as a politics of repeated agreement-making: governance forums and deliberative bodies designed to “ferment consent” over time, including a forum method operating since 1999 and other meeting architectures that coordinate residents’ associations, worker-support groups, and facility planning.

In conversation with scholarship on the institutional remaking of urban marginality in Japan, the paper argues that Nishinari’s hub is best understood as an infrastructure of inclusion-by-patching – a continuous labor of stitching together eligibility, housing, care, and everyday addressability, while also producing new forms of sorting and temporal discipline.

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Paper short abstract

AI applications have been introduced in various municipalities in Japan with the promise to give advice on child protection, elderly care, disability support or healthcare. This leads to the question to what extend does AI technology improve and secure the access to welfare services on local level.

Paper long abstract

Artificial Intelligence (AI) as an emerging technology evokes manifold hopes, expectations, and concerns across various disciplines. The practical application of AI technologies increasingly intersects with various social contexts in Japan, among them is the field of welfare services. AI applications have been introduced in various municipalities in Japan with the promise to provide orientation and advice on topics like child protection, elderly care, disability support or healthcare. Among local communities and other facilities these AI applications are presented as tools for receiving advice, raising efficiency, or improving decision-making for persons in charge. This leads to the question in which ways and to what extend does AI technology improve and secure the access to welfare services on local level. A quantitative newspaper analysis among articles of the Asahi Shimbun and Yomiuri Shimbun between Jul 2023 till Jun 2025 shows that the topic of AI in reference to health, care and disability support topics receive continuous attention. In contrast, the attention for AI technology in reference to childcare and child protection related topics have surged particularly since Jan 2025. This paper choses analytical approaches from the field of STS and welfare studies to shed light on critical aspects of AI and intersections of welfare service provision in modern society. It intends to deepen the quantitative insights of the newspaper analysis by furthering the study with a qualitative case study on AI welfare service applications in Shinagawa ward in Tokyo and other municipalities.