Art Therapy in Japan: Promoting Resilience and Wellbeing through Community-Based and Culturally Rooted Practices

In contemporary Japan, mental health has become one of the most pressing social concerns. Anxiety, depression, and various forms of psychosocial distress affect a growing number of people within a cultural environment that often silences suffering and places strong emphasis on self-control. Although the healthcare and social welfare system is highly developed, it continues to struggle with complex forms of distress deeply embedded in everyday social relations. Against this backdrop, non-pharmacological approaches capable of restoring a more human, holistic, and community-oriented dimension to care are attracting increasing interest. Among these approaches, the arts therapies stand out for their capacity to integrate the aesthetic, bodily, and relational dimensions of health. Artistic practices – including music, movement, visual arts, and collaborative creation – play a central role in supporting emotional control, identity reconstruction, social cohesion, and active participation, fostering forms of well-being that are both sustainable and culturally sensitive. Nevertheless, dedicated arts therapy centres offering high-quality and coherent programmes remain limited and unevenly distributed across Japan, reflecting a field that is still in the process of consolidation, while seeking broader institutional recognition. Within this landscape, the experience of the centre known as momo (Music, Outsider Art, Movement, Open Studio) in Kyoto, alongside other emerging initiatives across the country, offers a significant example of innovation. By integrating multiple arts-therapeutic disciplines, momo provides accessible, non-clinical spaces in which artistic practice becomes a means of expression, self-construction, and the reweaving of community bonds. The centre has also contributed to the development of the Integrated Arts Therapy Evaluation Framework (IATEF), an interdisciplinary methodological tool designed to document engagement, creativity, and psychosomatic well-being without reducing these processes to overly clinical parameters. Beyond methodological advancement, this work invites a broader understanding of care as a social and cultural practice. In a Japan marked by widespread psychological fragility, the arts therapies are increasingly recognised as a crucial resource for regenerating social bonds, promoting creativity and community cohesion, and articulating shared forms of resilience. More than therapeutic techniques, they constitute cultural processes capable of mitigating social fragmentation and strengthening collective well-being in contemporary Japan.