Issue:
June 2026 | Japan Media Review
About 10 million seniors in Japan suffer from dementia or some form of cognitive impairment - and they hold ¥260 trillion in assets. So government attempts to overhaul the adult guardianship system are under scrutiny.
In early April, the government adopted a bill it hopes to pass by the end of the year that will revise the adult guardianship system. This system was implemented in 2000 in conjunction with the launch of the elderly caregiving (kaigo) insurance scheme. The current system assigns guardians to adults who are judged to have impaired cognitive faculties that make it difficult for them to see to their own affairs. Guardians are selected by family courts and charged with carrying out legal and financial transactions on behalf of the subjects. In most cases, courts choose lawyers and notary publics to be guardians.
Over the years, the system has led to problems, especially among families of the subjects. Elderly persons can choose their own guardians while they are deemed cognitively capable. If no guardian has been selected and dementia sets in, then family courts assign guardians, which can only be replaced or removed through another court order. The revised system would make it possible to change or remove guardians more easily.
The Asahi Shimbun has been running a series of features about the proposed legislation that analyzes the guardianship system's effectiveness. An April 15 article reports that 30 percent of seniors living alone who have been assessed by the kaigo insurance system as being eligible for nursing care cannot fend for themselves in terms of financial management, according to a Keio University survey of 3,000 subjects living in Osaka Prefecture. This includes paying rent and utilities and using banking services. Sixty-one percent of seniors who are assessed as being in the most severe category for receiving kaigo assistance cannot manage their own assets. Also, 11.3 percent of seniors living alone say they have been victims of swindlers or swindling attempts, while 20 percent of these respondents say they did not report these incidents to the authorities.
As pointed out in a May 17 discussion in the Asahi, one of the reasons the guardianship system is so strict is that it essentially evolved from an old law that regulated the affairs of people who the authorities determine lack individual agency due to intellectual disabilities. This law was removed from the Civil Code in 2000 when the guardianship system was enacted. According to Kochi Miyauchi, a Keio University professor and an expert in geriatrics who runs an organization that advises seniors who have issues with the guardianship system, seniors and disabled individuals who are assigned guardians basically lose their civil rights until a court reverses the decision. This situation became even more of a problem in 2016 when a new law to "promote" the adult guardianship system was enacted and local governments responded by more aggressively exploiting a bureaucratic tool called "shucho moshitate," wherein the chief executive of a local government can order the protective custody of a resident, in order to meet guardianship quotas. The matter eventually came to the attention of a UN committee for the rights of the disabled, which in 2022 urged Japan to revise its laws so as to remove its "proxy system" for people with cognitive decline since it found that the system discriminates against people with disabilities.
In 2025, 4.72 million seniors in Japan were diagnosed with dementia and another 5.64 million with mild cognitive impairment (MCI). As Asahi points out, while the guardianship system has its own standards for judging cognitive capability, financial institutions tend to be more severe. If a bank decides that a depositor is cognitively incapacitated, they can lock the person out of their account. In 2024, the government asked financial institutions to "respect the will of [senior] depositors," but a bank can lock a person out of their account for whatever reason it sees fit. Securities companies automatically limit trading activity for people over 75, regardless of cognitive capabilities, so as to prevent possible exploitation by third parties. In Japan, two-thirds of all financial assets are held by seniors. One Keio professor involved in the survey told Asahi that the amount of assets held by people with cognitive dysfunction is estimated to be about ¥260 trillion, a matter that alarms the government, since this money remains out of circulation due to the subjects' or their families inability to access it readily.
Many of the problems attributed to the guardianship system have involved seniors who own property and hold sizable assets. In April, Asahi reported on a case that began in March 2022. A "man in his 90s" living alone in a condominium he owned in Minato Ward, Tokyo, was brought to a hospital in Saitama Prefecture under a medical emergency order authorized by the ward office through the shucho moshitate protocol. About two months later, the man's daughter learned of the hospitalization when the ward office contacted her by post, saying that the ward had deemed his cognitive faculties "insufficient" and thus was seeking to appoint a guardian for him. The daughter, who was not aware of the hospitalization until she received the letter, contacted the ward office to find out where her father was being treated but they refused to tell her. She told Asahi that she started calling every hospital in the Tokyo metropolitan area and after many calls finally located her father. In July 2022 she went to the hospital with a lawyer and had her father discharged.
Meanwhile, the ward had started proceedings in family court to have a guardian assigned to the man based on a diagnosis of Alzheimer's-like dementia made by a doctor at the Saitama hospital. In September, the family court approved the search for a guardian. However, the daughter countered that she noticed no particular loss of cognitive function in her father and appealed to a higher court to have the family court decision vacated. She brought her father to several physicians who all said he did not suffer from dementia. Then the Saitama doctor who made the initial diagnosis reportedly changed his mind. In October 2023, the Tokyo High Court returned the case to family court, which then cancelled the guardianship search. In April, Kyodo News service reported on a similar case of a 93-year-old Minato Ward resident named Shohei Mitani who is suing the ward for attempting to take away his civil rights through the guardianship system. Kyodo News does not say if Mitani is the same man covered by Asahi, which did not name him in their articles.
According to the online news site Front Line Press (FLP), there are at least 30 similar cases being contested throughout Japan where local governments have unilaterally started proceedings to assign guardians to seniors without their families' knowledge. In fact, three such cases are pending in Minato Ward alone involving seniors with sizable assets and property. According to FLP, in most cases the senior had requested medical assistance and the relevant office then determined that the senior could not handle their own affairs. FLP concludes that the people in charge of these matters in the local government are not qualified to make such decisions and act "on their own prejudices."
The reason the authorities do not work with families in these cases is that one of the purposes of the guardianship system is to protect vulnerable seniors from "elder abuse," which often comes at the hands of family members. Consequently, when a local government or other authority determines that a senior is not capable of handling their own affairs, they bring the matter to family court and bypass the family altogether. In many cases of seniors in cognitive decline, including those who are in assisted living situations, family members readily access their bank accounts using the subjects' ATM cards or other instruments on their behalf. If the particular financial institution finds out that family members are using ATM cards that are not theirs they can shut down the accounts. However, this is often the only means that the family has of accessing a senior members' assets to pay for care or tap social security payments once the senior member has become unable to do so themselves.
Such limitations can also apply to cases where the subject of the guardianship procedure is not an elderly person with cognitive dysfunction but rather a person with a disability. Another article in the Asahi series explained the situation of a 56-year-old woman who was involved in an automobile accident 13 years ago. She suffered a fractured skull that resulted in impaired cognitive function. During her convalescence the woman received a hefty settlement from the accident and also inherited money from her deceased parents. The woman's sister applied to the Osaka Family Court to be her guardian, even though the woman said she could take care of herself. When the court asked a doctor to assess her condition, the doctor said she had serious cognitive deterioration. In 2013, the court assigned the woman two guardians, a lawyer and a social worker, despite the fact that the woman had been taking care of her own financial affairs since the accident. The guardians set up a system whereby ¥25,000 was transferred from her assets to her post office bank account every ten days for life expenses. She also received an allowance of ¥13,000 a week. With this money she had to do all her shopping and everyday transactions. Meanwhile, her guardians collected a regular fee from her assets and did nothing else except meet with her periodically.
The woman, who owned her own condominium, claimed she could not live comfortably on the money alloted to her by the guardians and, in fact, could only afford one meal a day. She could not access her assets or even check them to see how much her guardians were getting paid. When she asked the court for a copy of the guardianship order she was allowed to read it only once on a computer screen. Eventually, she learned that her two guardians were together receiving more than ¥1 million a year in fees from her account. She sued to stop the guardianship setup, but it wasn't until March of this year that she was reevaluated by a doctor, who found she could live independently and hold down a job. She is still waiting for the court to rescind her guardianship order.
In an April 24 article, Asahi explained how guardians are compensated. Lawyers or notaries are usually assigned as guardians since they have a working understanding of the laws involved. The Tokyo Family Court usually sets monthly compensation for guardians at around ¥20,000, paid by the subjects out of their own pockets. However, depending on the severity of the cognitive assessment, the fee amounts can go much higher. Determination of fees may also depend on the subject's ability to pay. According to the Japan Bar Association, 16.5 percent of lawyers who are assigned as guardians receive no compensation.
This brings up another complaint about the system, which is that guardians themselves can exploit their access to subjects' assets. The government says that over the last ten years, there have been 111 confirmed cases in Japan of guardians improperly appropriating funds from the seniors they serve, amounting to a loss of ¥860 million. There are also cases where guardians have sold real estate owned by their subjects without informing the subject or their families. Because it is so difficult to replace a guardian once they are assigned, these improprieties can go undetected. As already noted, most of the problems attributed to the guardianship system emerge with subjects who have property and assets. When the subjects have no appreciable assets and no heirs or close family ties, guardians can be essential so that these seniors can lead normal lives, but many of them are also receiving public assistance of some kind.
Though the government has outlined how its proposed revision to the guardianship system will make it easier for subjects to have control over their assets and property, the Asahi expresses skepticism as to whether the system will really change in a practical way. For one thing, any revisions would not be retroactive, meaning people already assigned guardians by family courts will still have to get a court order to remove or change their guardians. The key, according to experts, is to find a middle ground that sees to the proper execution of a subject's affairs while respecting the subject's will and capacity for choosing. These experts agree that such a determination comes down to recognizing the subject's individual rights.
Philip Brasor is a Tokyo-based writer who covers entertainment, the Japanese media, and money issues. He writes the Japan Media Watch column for the Number 1 Shimbun.
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