Abstract: The development of new type of think tanks with Chinese characteristics has been heated discussed, while Japan, as an early aging society, is likely to shed several light on the building of the professional think tanks on labor and social security. The paper takes a retrospect of the development of typical labor and social security think tanks in Japan with civil, governmental and universitybased categories. Civil think tanks remained professional and fiscal sustainable by combining with charitable foundations: governmental ones are in the integrating trend, with related legislation giving them relative independency; their universitybased counterparts were fiscally competitive by nature, prioritizing the internal and external resource integration. The features of these think tanks include: emphasis on field work and data mining, differential governance by the nature of the thinktank founder, diversified channels of fiscal resources, multilevel deliveries of the influence.

Key words: Japan, abor and social security, think tank, category, feature