social-welfare

Seven Years of Young-Carer Mentions in Japanese Local Assemblies — The Time Structure of 'Children Who Care for Family Members' in Assembly Discourse

Drawing on the assembly-minutes dataset built at the machikarte Lab, this article aggregates speeches mentioning 'young carer' or 'youth carer' by year and prefecture from 2018 to 2024. Mention counts were near zero before 2020, surged sharply from 2021 onward, and reached their seven-year peak in 2024. Prefecture-level mention density varies by a factor of roughly ten, making it possible to observe both the time-lag effects of awareness-raising measures and the underlying regional disparities.