Self-help (jijo), Mutual help (kyojo), and Public help (kojo) from the White Paper on Health, Labour and Welfare 2025

In August this year, the White Paper on Health, Labour and Welfare 2025 (Reiwa 7) was released. The White Paper consists of two parts: Part I focuses on a special theme for the year, while Part II provides detailed explanations of overall health, labour, and welfare policies.

The title of Part I this year is “To the Youth Who Will Lead the Next Generation: Understanding the Role of Social Security and Labour Policies in a Changing Society.” It is written in plain language aimed at young people, explaining Japan’s social security and labour systems in an accessible way.

One section that helped me organize my thoughts clearly was the discussion on self-help (jijo), mutual help (kyojo), and public help (kojo). These terms are often used in various contexts, but “mutual help” has always been somewhat unclear to me.

Self-help is easy to understand—it means taking care of oneself. Public help roughly means the government taking responsibility to assist people. But what exactly is mutual help? It’s often explained as “helping each other within the community or local area,” but whether one can actually visualize that depends on the person. If you live in a small rural village, that image might be concrete. However, for urban residents with no clear sense of belonging to a local community, it remains just an abstract concept. If mutual help is built on that, then it’s hard to understand who is supposed to help whom and how.

In previous editions of the White Paper, the terms self-help, mutual help, and public help were also used, but they were never clearly defined, leaving their meanings ambiguous. In the 2025 edition, however, the concepts are neatly organized. The paper doesn’t rely on explanations involving “community” or “neighborhood.” Instead, it explains that Japan’s social security system was developed on the assumption that the era when people could rely on such local or communal ties has already ended. It then defines self-help, mutual help, and public help as shown in the following diagram.

As the diagram indicates, mutual help refers to the various systems funded by social insurance premiums—such as pensions, health insurance, and long-term care insurance—and is positioned as something that complements self-help.

Some people might disagree with this interpretation. One could argue that these systems should instead be supported by taxes, or conversely, that mutual help should be abolished altogether. Nonetheless, by clarifying the correspondence between funding sources and systems, the government’s stance has become easier to understand.
(In that sense, the White Paper provides young people with valuable material for forming their own opinions—whether in support or opposition—by making the framework more transparent.)

That said, it’s important to remember that this is a White Paper on Health, Labour and Welfare, not an Economic White Paper. Therefore, it does not discuss how self-help, mutual help, and public help would function if they were funded by taxes or government bonds, or if market mechanisms were utilized.