Defining “Welfare and Guidance” for College Students in Early Postwar Japan:
Discussion Process in the Student Welfare Council
This paper clarifies how “welfare and guidance ” for college students were discussed and defined in the early postwar years. I analyzed the discussion process in the Student
Welfare Council, which was formed in MEXT. After World War II, welfare and guidance were implemented through a variety of measures until the 1950s. Previous studies have pointed out that the systematic definition and content of welfare and guidance appeared for the first time in a report by the Student Welfare Council in 1958. Since then, this framework has long been the model for student affairs at Japanese universities. In this paper, I examined the process of deliberation in the “joint working group of welfare and guidance” by analyzing the minutes of the Council. These primary sources are examined for the first time in this paper.
There were three main findings: (1) the classification and standardization of welfare and guidance contributed to the clarification of those activities; (2) the categories of welfare and guidance gradually expanded and diversified; and (3) the final report reflected each university's activities through members of the working group, who were deeply involved in the contexts and realities of welfare and guidance.