Long-Term Care Insurance, marketization and the quality of care: 'good time living' in a recently established nursing home in a suburb of Tokyo.

Faced with the demands of the rapidly ageing population, the Japanese government introduced Long-Term Care Insurance (LTCI) in 2000, which has led to a substantial debate over the effects of marketization on the quality of care and the universal availability of care. Eight years later, even as they note that there are problems with LTCI, many agree that LTCI has produced some positive results worthy of attention; most importantly it has helped establish a 'national consensus' that the care of the elderly is no longer just a family obligation. Particularly noteworthy is the fact that various types of private senior housing have become much more affordable and popular and can, in the author's opinion, play an important role in the socialization of care in the Japanese cultural context. Using a concrete example of a relatively well-functioning private senior home in the outskirts of Tokyo, the present paper will examine how care can be organized in a private regime with emphasis on the possible effect of marketization. To give my analysis a comparative and feminist perspective, I will draw on the international and Norwegian feminist discourse on the ethics of care in dependency work - an ethics that attempts to relativize hitherto undisputed concepts in public management such as equality and rationality by taking into account the necessarily specific nature of care, which resists generalization and standardization. The essay will try at the same time to assess the potential of and the challenges for LTCI in the future. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]