(25 Jun 2025) Researchers in Japan have found that the more public library books a municipality has, the fewer residents require long-term nursing care. Why is this? The Mainichi Shimbun spoke with one of the authors of the research paper titled “Public libraries and functional disability: A cohort study of Japanese older adults.”
The research was led by Koryu Sato, a lecturer at Keio University’s Faculty of Policy Management, and Saeko Otani, a Kyoto University Faculty of Medicine graduate currently in training, using the results of a survey tracking more than 70,000 elderly individuals over seven years, and their study was published in the March issue of the medical journal SSM – Population Health.
They utilized data from the Japan Gerontological Evaluation Study, one of the largest surveys of elderly individuals in Japan. The study analyzed data from 73,138 people aged 65 and older who were healthy in 2013 and lived in 19 cities and towns across the country, tracking them until 2021. During this period, 16,336 individuals, or 22.3%, were certified as needing long-term nursing care.
Sato and Otani examined the number of books in public libraries in these 19 municipalities and analyzed their relationship with the number of certifications showing people required long-term care. “In fact, we didn’t expect a correlation between libraries and health,” Sato admitted. The results were therefore surprising.
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