4. A bifurcated nonprofit sector
While the overall size of the Japanese nonprofit sector is fairly large, as indicated by the data presented here, it consists of two different types of organizations. The first set of organizations are legally well-defined (based on the civil code) and well-recognized nonprofit corporations, such as public benefit corporations, medical corporations, private school corporations, and social welfare corporations. The central and local governments have had strong discretionary power over these organizations and have encouraged their growth. The second set of organizations is basically grassroots groups that engage in such activities as environmental protection, advocacy, community development, and international cooperation. Most of these grassroots organizations are small and their revenue structure is fairly fragile.
These nonprofit organizations have long been less visible in Japan than in most developed countries. Until the 1995 Kobe earthquake, Japanese nonprofit organizations operated in the shadow of the state. With little explicit public support, they scarcely recognized themselves as belonging to a coherent "sector." Moreover, existing legal provisions erected a seemingly insurmountable wall between formally incorporated nonprofit organizations and the sizable assortment of citizen groups that have emerged over the past decade or more at the community level in Japan. These citizen groups were cultivated over the last several years in response to the growing frustrations of citizens over environmental and social issues, among other problems; they sought to rectify the limitations that prevented citizen action in Japan's increasingly pluralistic- though still bureaucratically dominated- society by providing opportunities for civic engagement. In Japan, where a sharp divide has long existed between citizens and large incorporated nonprofit institutions, a divide now exists between these incorporated nonprofits and the growing number of informal citizen groups, in large part because these small organizations do not have access to official legal status and the important privileges that legal recognition carries with it.
5. Industrial structure of Japan's nonprofit: health dominance
Reflecting this fact, health care clearly dominates the nonprofit scene in Japan, similar to that in the United States and the Netherlands, but unlike the other project countries.
1) Over 47 percent of nonprofit employment in health.
Nonprofit employment in most Western European and Latin American countries is concentrated in either social services or education, while Eastern Europe's nonprofit sector is clearly dominated by culture and sports activities. In contrast, of all the areas of nonprofit activity, the field that accounts for the largest share of nonprofit employment in Japan is health care. As shown in Figure 6, 47.1 percent of all nonprofit employment in Japan is concentrated in the health care field. This is comparable to only two other countries in the sample: the United States (46.3 percent of nonprofit employment) and the Netherlands (41.8 percent). In the case of Japan, this heavy concentration of health care-related employment reflects the fact that the nonprofit sector is the major provider of health services in Japan. Indeed, over 70 percent of all health care employees are employed within the nonprofit sector. Consequently, health care dwarfs all other fields of activity in the Japanese nonprofit sector.
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2) Sizable nonprofit presence in education and social services.
Another sizable portion of total nonprofit employment in Japan is concentrated in the fields of education and social services, which together account for 39 percent of all nonprofit employment, slightly below the developed country averages.
