Japan's social welfare studies started in Japan's Women's University as early as in 1921, but
what paved the way for it to expand throughout the country was the need for education to
train poor relief officials, the assistant staffs of social welfare administration and to train social
workers following the setup of welfare offices in accordance with GHQ. Later in 1987,
reinforcement of social welfare education following the enactment of "Social Worker and Care
Worker Law" further served as a momentum to develop the curriculum of social welfare
education. The purpose of this research is to look at the overall development process of
Japan's social welfare system and to examine the characteristics found in the guidelines of
social welfare education and the implication that these characteristics may have in Korea's
social welfare education.
There are two guidelines in Japan's social welfare subjects, one for fostering social welfare
workers and another for presenting state exams for social worker license by Center of Social
Welfare Promotion and National Examination, but these two are the same in contents. The first
of the several differences of the guidelines for social welfare education of Japan from those of
Korea is that in Japan it is the union of social welfare education schools and the Ministry of
Health, Labor, and Welfare that set the various guidelines and regulations, and that the exams
for the social welfare worker license are given in accordance with the guideline for the
subjects. The second difference is that subject guidelines are field centered. The third is that
social work practicum is 180 hours in total, but in order to raise the quality of the social
work practicum, 150 hours are spent on drills and the 90 hours on field instruction.