This article explores the changing nature and patterns of the ‘generational contract’, with particular reference to the exchange of nursing care and housing assets between older parents and their adult children. Inheritance practices and attitudes are used to examine the ways in which socio-economic, demographic and policy changes have recently altered the conventional arrangements in Japanese society. The previously defined ‘generational contract’ is now ambiguous, and the expectations and obligations of different family members are fragmented. This article also discusses whether such practices in Japan are unique and the ways in which they differ from the English situation. Family obligations and inheritance have been more explicitly connected in the Japanese social and legal systems, while in England there is neither legal obligation to support older parents nor any constraint on inheritance. This article elucidates the similarities and differences in the patterns of inheritance and thus the exchange models between care and inheritance in the two societies.

The demographic revolution has caused turmoil in public policy, leading governments to scale down their commitments to the old, more in panic than in thoughtful response. At the same time, significant changes in family patterns have placed at risk the inter-generational support older people might have expected. Together these structural shifts have stimulated a new debate about the obligations one generation has to another. This essay attempts to bring together the several discrete debates about demography, family and the generational contract. In juxtaposing gerontological evidence and discussions with those about moral order and the state of the social contract in ‘post-modern’ society; it reaffirms the need for personal and social solidarity as the foundation for trust and reciprocity between generations.