Maternal and Child Health: - Work together and learn together for maternal and child health handbook-.

It was quite a while ago that I studied in Boston as a Takemi Fellow, but the days I spent in the scholarship program still remain one of the most exciting and fruitful periods of my life. It was a year in which I encountered many different people, learned a lot, and came to realize many things that I hadn’t noticed before. The participants of the program included a number of brilliant people from all over the world, who are now working in influential roles such as professors in Thailand, Korea, and Brazil. Through daily interactions with them, I found that they wanted to learn about Japan during the era when it was a developing country. They wanted me to share about the process of how Japan achieved a healthcare wonder. I didn’t have the answers at that time, and through my discussions with these colleagues, I learned that Japan should be more aware of the value of its past achievements. One thing that I came to appreciate in the course of these discussions was the magnificent decrease in Japan’s infant mortality rate (Slide 1). Today, the world is striving to attain the UN Millennium Development Goal of reducing by two-thirds the child mortality rate over a 25-year period. Although countries are working towards this goal with the target year of 2015, many are frustrated by the slow progress. Japan reduced its infant mortality rate at twice that speed, cutting it down to one-sixth in 25 years, and this incredible achievement was based on the country’s own initiative. At present, the average life expectancy at birth for females in Japan is 86.4 years, which is a surprisingly long life expectancy for anyone in the world. Everyone wants to know how this was achieved, and I feel that we need to understand and fully appreciate the value of this process. This slide shows a comparison of the infant mortality rates in Japan and the US (Slide 2). The infant mortality rate in Japan declined rapidly after the end of the chaotic period following World War II, falling below that of the US in 1964, which just so happened to be the year of the Tokyo Olympics. Japan was still a developing country then. Although Japan developed the bullet train, it had to take a loan from the World Bank to do so. Despite this dependence on international assistance, Japan recorded a mortality rate lower than that of the US. What enabled this achievement? Japan’s health indi cators went up before the country developed economically, and this fact aroused considerable interest among American researchers. I conducted joint research Maternal and Child Health*