"In Japan's super-aging society, there is growing concern due to the fact that the number of intermediate age workers who need to take care of elderly family members has increased rapidly in the last few decades. However, there is limited research investigating the time use of those workers who are giving care to elderly family members. Using Japanese time-use data, this paper investigates how the time use of intermediate age caregivers has evolved in the last few decades. The main findings are as follows. Firstly, according to our estimation, the number of caregivers has increased from 3.56 million people in 1991 to 6.83 million people in 2011. Secondly, contrary to the growing number of caregivers, the time used for giving care has decreased tremendously since 2001. On the other hand, working hours have increased during the same period. Thirdly, using Oaxaca-Blinder decomposition, we tried to investigate the reason for the decrease in time spent giving care to elderly family members. Although the decline in time spent giving care is partially explained by the implementation of the Long-Term Care Insurance Act in 2000, for the most part it remains unexplained."

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