Healthcare and well-being communicationWell-being communication research is a multi-faceted activity in many ways. The edifice of healthcare/well-being communicationWell-being communication research rests on a range of theoretical and methodological approaches, e.g. narrative analysisNarrative analysis, discourse studies, conversation analysis and multimodalityMultimodality in interaction. It also transcends boundaries of academic disciplines, such as quality and safety in healthcare, public health, sociology and applied/sociolinguistics in healthcare and well-being. Sociocultural and religious aspects are also in the scope since health involves not only a physical or mental state but social well-being as defined in the constitution of the World Health Organisation (International Health Conference in Bull World Health Organ 80(12):983–984, 2002). The borders of these disciplines are blurred, and researchers mediate among them, involving a multidisciplinary team and integrating different methodological approaches in local sociocultural settings of their own research fields. In this volume, we distinguish the two terms: health communicationHealth communication, which refers to the supra-category including macro and micro health communicationHealth communication research, and healthcare communicationHealthcare communication, which refers to a subsidiary area where micro/linguistic analyses of interactions in person in healthcare encounters are conducted by sociolinguists and discourse and conversation analysts. This volume contributes to the latter in Japanese context, which is still marginalised in the research field. The introductory chapter first reviews a brief history of health communication research, moving on to a summary of the existing study of healthcare communicationHealthcare communication inside and outside of Japan, and ends with an overview of this volume.