This study adopted the method of the participation-type action research. Action research was reflective practice research, a method that had the potential to yield insights that could not be obtained from a positivist perspective alone [17]. For the residents in Town A in Fukushima, social isolation of male elderly people living alone was the concern in particular. For isolation prevention, the author planned and drafted the action that aims to promote independent community participation for male elderly people, and held it continuously with the participants’ cooperation for data collection based on the participants’ understanding on its purpose. The author repeated practice and evaluation of the action by conducting questionnaire to the participants each time.

Town A in Fukushima prefecture, which is the subject region of this study, is located in Hamadori in Fukushima prefecture in South Tohoku of Japan. It is the place that is nearest from the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Station, and some part is located within the range of 5 km in direct distance from the power plant. Approximately 21,000 people lived there before the earthquake disaster, and it is richly endowed with nature such as sea, mountains and rivers, being famous for marine products. The coastal region suffered the enormous damage caused by seismic sea waves in the Great East Japan Earthquake and the evacuation order was issued to the whole town for the accident of the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Station, which forced the residents to live in the shelter for six years. Although the evacuation order was canceled for some regions in March, 2017, it does not mean Town A was recovered to the original state, and the life while the town was gradually activated for restoration such as infrastructure maintenance continued. Based on the information site of Town A, change of Town A during the period from the accident of the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Station to the action performed in December, 2019 is shown in Table 1 together with transition of the number of residents and households.

Among the male elderly people who were 60 years or older and participated in the action held by the researcher in 2018-2019, those who agreed to cooperate with the study, including recording of discussion.

The researcher explained about the purpose and content of the meeting, the purpose and method of the study, document store method, ethical consideration and so on to the participants, and obtained oral consent for the use of recording data for reports and the study.

From August, 2018 to December, 2019.

The author explained about the purpose of the study to the town office staff members of the section in charge of elderly people, and obtained consent for implementation of the action and cooperation for it. The meeting place of an apartment house in Town A was used as a main hall and the subjects were informed of it by distribution of flyers beforehand.

Form of the action was salon, and the researcher

1) Planned a scheme for which the subjects’ “What I want to do next” is considered,

2) Set time for events including dining with other subjects, and

3) Set time for discussion mainly on the topic of “Community formation” every time.

Action implementation time was determined as 3 - 5 hours including lunch hour.

The discussion content of each time was recorded as data. The researcher set a discussion theme for promoting community formation. Different themes were set every time, and some of them were proposed by participants. Data were collected four times in 2018 and five times in 2019, nine times in total.

Discussion scenes were recorded under permission, and the participants’ speech contents were verbalized. Identical participant’s parts were treated as one line. After that, the researcher obtained basic information of the text, examined word appearance frequency transition and word dependency frequency transition, and performed word network analysis and notable word information analysis for each year using the language analysis software Text Mining studio 6.4 (NTT data system). Since it was found that “iu” and “sou” included in the sentences converted to texts could be regarded as words they mention as a habit when they say “to iuyouna” “souitta” when referring to the original sentences, they were excluded from the analyses.

This study was approved by the Ethical Review Board of the university that the researchers belong to (reference number 2018-032). The researcher explained about the purpose of this study to the subjects at the time of the first participation, and that nonparticipation would not cause any disadvantage, data would be processed in the way that the place of refuge and individuals could not be identified and the data obtained in the action would not be used for purposes other than the study purpose both orally and in document form.

The action was implemented nine times in total during the period from 2018 to 2019. The basic information of the texts obtained from all nine times of discussion data was total line count 869, total sentence count 1604, total word count 6433 and word type count 2096.

The average age of 14 participants (age band) in the first participation was 73.67 years old (67 - 83 years old). For households, the number of subjects who were living alone and living with their life was six for each, and the number of those who were living with their mother and living with their child was one for each. For neighborly relations since they moved to Town A, seven answered “I almost don’t know about my neighbour”, four answered “There are familiar people I know”, one answered “There are no people living in my neighborhood” and one answered “There are several people I know”. Further, the number of people from Town A town is around 4 - 5, and others had migrated to Town A for their job before the earthquake disaster.

Shown in Table 2 are Date and time, the number of participants, theme, discussion time and basic information on text mining of each action. The number of participants of each action was 4 - 8, the total number of participants was 57 (FY2018: 20, FY2019: 37), and the repeat rate was 71.93% (FY2018: 50%, FY2019: 83.78%). Discussion themes in 2018, the first year, were mostly of the participants themselves such as “Motivation for participation”. In 2019, the themes shifted to those toward the environment and others people such as “Present situation of the town”, “How can we encourage other people who do not participate in the action to join us?” and so on. The discussion time was 29 - 60 minutes (average 42 minutes and 21 seconds). For discussion themes, the researcher prepared topics for community formation. The participants voluntarily presented topics from the 7th and 8th actions.

Shown in Table 3 are Date and time, the number of participants, theme, discussion time and basic information on text mining of each action. The number of participants of each action was 4 - 8, the total number of participants was 57 (FY2018: 20, FY2019: 37), and the repeat rate was 71.93% (FY2018: 50%, FY2019: 83.78%). Discussion themes in 2018, the first year, were mostly of the participants themselves such as “Motivation for participation”. In 2019, the themes shifted to those toward the environment and others people such as “Present situation of the town”, “How can we encourage other people who do not participate in the action to join us?” and so on. The discussion time was 29 - 60 minutes (average 42 minutes and 21 seconds). For discussion themes, the researcher prepared topics for community formation. The participants voluntarily presented topics from the 7th and 8th actions.

Extracted top 20 words of each year with the number of times of appearance as attribute.

The authors performed a word network analysis for 2018 and 2019 to capture the unity of the topics of each year (Figure 1). The word network is a analysis that visualizes collocation of words. Collocation means word phrase relationships that appear together in the same sentence and designated data. For the nodes attached to the words, larger nodes indicate higher appearance frequency. The collocation is expressed by edge, not far and near of the location of nodes. The edge indicates direction of the relation while thicker edge indicates stronger collocation. In order to grasp the difference in unity of the network of each year, the setting was not changed by year, and collocation was extracted with 60% as the minimum confidence and top 50 words as the extraction upper limit for more than two times of appearance frequency. Further, network relationships whose topics could be grouped were boxed and named as a group.

From the common experience such as forced refuge by the accident, obviously fewer residents than those before the accident and life during the reconstruction process of resources such as public help, it is easy to infer that they participate for new connection in the opportunity where only males gather. The participants’ topics are influenced by activation of the environment and residents such as gradual increase in residential population, opening of a supermarket with a major distribution group, gradual increase in stores, increase in official or private meeting and so on. However, the change of the contents is result of this action since they were obtained in the discussion in this action. Now, see the discussion topics of each year based on the analysis result. From the dependency relationship of “Person” and “Town A” that appeared frequently in the word appearance frequency analysis of nouns, it has been revealed that characteristics of general people and own living in Town A were talked in the discussion in 2018. When look at a word network, more than a half of the words are small network, and contents regarding themselves including easiness of living and environment and participation into the meeting were seen for Town A. [What is felt while sheltering] was a topic in the large network. On the other hand, in 2019, although the use of “Person” did not change, “People” were used several times, “Town A” had a dependency relationship with the words related to those used for a topic about the Town A residents other than themselves. In the word networks, topics to consider how to make residents who did not participate in the community to participate were discussed in the two large networks such as [Consider how to collect participants] and [Realization of the difficulty in encouraging people]. Since there were many continuous participants and the discussion themes became spontaneous, it has been revealed that the participants wish to participate in the new community formation voluntarily.

Japan is now unprecedented aged society. While we are experiencing the change in social structure such as the falling birthrate, the aging population, population decline and the weakening of the community, realization of “local symbiotic society” is required that enables community residents to develop each person’s living and definite aim and the region supporting each other so that people can live comfortably in the region that they were familiar with while holding various life problems [27]. Therefore, what has been expected in considering structure to support residents’ life is the social role that the elderly people and people in the same generation assume to support other generations, which had been rather for “socially vulnerable” and “subjects of medical service and welfare” [28]. Jaeuk Lee et al. state that there is a personal viewpoint that maintenance of their definite aim and health is achieved by attempting to join the society other than the social viewpoint that stability of the social life and maintenance of the social order are achieved by elderly person living in the society with definite aim as a meaning of the social participation of elderly people [29]. Utilization of elderly people is thought to influence self help and mutual help in four helps of community comprehensive care [30]. The idea is to live own life utilizing not only the mutual help including public help and nursing care insurance but also self help that helps residents themselves based on their own resources for solving problem and mutual help, which is informal support, including connections between neighborhoods [30]. Here, consider self help, mutual help, mutual assistance and public help of Town A town from the viewpoint of this community comprehensive care and discuss the positioning of this action. The action started in Town A when one year had passed since the evacuation order was canceled. The government office had its functions at that time and therefore it is easy to imagine that preparation for restoring resources of public help and mutual assistance to support residents’ life was being pushed forward. It is difficult to depend on mutual help such as neighborhoods to solve problems since there are only few residents, and residents who are capable of helping themselves live in the community, the authors infer. Although various informal organizations such as the hobby activity group were organized even before the start of this action, since the main target was male elderly people, most of the participants joined the activity continuously even though it was held bimonthly. According to a survey by the Cabinet Office on the participation of the elderly in the community, men were more likely to feel a sense of purpose in life when they were enthusiastic about their favorite activities. The survey was conducted by the Cabinet Office [31]. One of the reasons why they were able to participate continuously was that their mind and body was sufficiently good for participation. Since words related to their hobby that can be enjoyed by multiple people, such as Mah-jong, Go and Karaoke were included in the discussion, as one of the policies that form the community in Town A, it became the definite aim to enjoy common hobbies together, the author presumes. Moreover, the above lead to the consideration of problems on community formation by participants themselves.

These embody the meaning of the social participation of elderly people proposed by Takano.

Takano also states that as meaning of the social participation of the elderly person, participating in activity bring opportunities to come in contact with other people, and that there are “Individual viewpoint” that maintenance of the definite aim and health and “Social viewpoint” that the fact that people in the advanced age period live in the society in which they can maintain their definite aim and health leads to maintenance of the stability of social life and social order [32].

This action, so-called informal support, is mutual help of the 4 assistants, it was thought that it could become a purpose of life for the participants themselves and could involve non-participants.

Although the present study was finished with the grasp of problems, the possibility that it will be an action which leads to settlement of problems on the local community activation has been suggested as one of the opportunities for energetic male elderly people to participate in community care.