I. Aging in Japan

A. Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wF14TCrMN2Q
B. Danely, Jason. 2014. Aging and Loss: Mourning and Maturity in Contemporary Japan. New Brunswick, NJ and London: Rutgers University Press.
C. Changing Demographics

1. Percentage of the Japanese population over age 65: 7% (1970, aging society) --> 14% (1994, super-aging society)
2. Fastest aging increase in history
3. 2013: 1 in 4 people were over 65
4. 2050 projection: 40% over 65, 1/4 over 75
5. 2013: birthrate 1.39 children per woman
6. Life expectancy: 80.85 for men, 87.71 for women
7. Population decrease: 128 million (2010) to 87 million (2060)

D. How to care for elderly in context in which care is family-based? Social, political, and economic challenge
E. Models of successful aging: prolong productive adulthood

1. Prolonging work (i.e., delaying retirement)
2. Promote active lifestyle: healthcare, diet, exercise
3. Financial, personal arrangements for later life

F. Dilemmas

1. "Being a burden"
2. High elder suicide rates
3. But Japan is known for respecting aging and the aged
4. Danely: Can't assume that modernization changes values

G. Changing subjectivities as people age

 

II. Memorialization

A. Subjectivities: "In my ethnographic research I found that regardless of sectarian affiliation or formal religious involvement, most older adults performed regular memorial rituals for the spirits of the departed, and even more tellingly, that there was near universal agreement that the feelings motivating these practices were something unique to late adulthood. As older adults come to identify their feelings toward the spirits as signs of old age, they open possibilities for aesthetically restructuring and engaging with their narratives of kinship, care, and loss" (6).
B. Aging population transforms cultural meanings and social institutions, emergent subjectivities (6).
C. Methods

1. Kyoto

a. pop. 1.5 million
b. Known for Buddhist temples, universities
c. Long, rich history of religious, artistic, other cultural activity

2. Participant observation at two senior welfare centers, two adult day care facilities
3. Local neighborhood organization and social welfare cooperative
4. 90 interviews with 30 informants
5. Lots of conversations
6. 12 people (6 men, 6 women): open-ended interviews over a one-year period

a. 7 lived with children, 5 alone or with spouse
b. Array of occupations, religious affiliations, educational levels (15-16).

D. Memorialization: "images and ritual practices for the ancestors and spirits of the family dead" (12).

1. "alleviates and reconfigures the emotional costs of upholding social institutions of kinship and succession" (12).
2. Ritual practices shape subjectivity: transforming abandonment, estrangement and loss into meaning, purpose, and connection (13).

E. Four themes

1. narrative and subjectivity: interrelational personhood, memorializing spirits to perpetuate ties between living and dead
2. cultural aesthetics: transience and open space
3. loss, grief and mourning: how do people experience it? Beautiful, but anxious, stressful
4. economy of care: interdependence and mutuality, but also contestation and negotiation

 

III. Spatial Dimensions of Obasuteyama Stories

A. "Aesthetic restructuring": narratives of space and time
B. Danely: Spatiotemporal subjectivity
C. Obasuteyama story: familiar throughout Japan

1. Middle-aged man carries old mother up mountain to abandon her to die
2. Many versions, but typically rural mountain village
3. Ecological, sociopolitical, personal, or generational pressures
4. Woman, approx. 70 years old, accepts fate
5. Woman becomes ancestor, ghost, stone
6. No evidence that this was ever an actual practice

D. The Ballad of Narayama (1983) (chapter 3)

1. Trailer
2. Aging population in midst of Japan's economic ascendance
3. Mountain symbolizes "place of both redemption and reunion for the old and for the spirits of the departed" (69).
4. "Aesthetic motifs of nature" = ways to think about kinship (69)
5. Narrative landscapes construct ideologies of family and belonging (69).

E. Actual spatial practices: cemeteries in Kyoto

1. Hillsides around city
2. 90-year-old woman, goes every day: when you are old, you don't need anything anymore
3. Memorialization in this space --> space to imagine the next life (74).
4. Visiting a grave: create aging subjectivities suspended between the weight of being burdensome and the lightness and hope of returning to the other world" (74).

F. Elders go up the mountain so younger people can go back down = grave visits connect elders to past and to relationships that extend to other side
G. Problematic landscapes: Mori-san's hoarding (chapter 5)

1. Front room not functional
2. Entryway to kitchen packed solid with shoeboxes
3. Things = "desires, memories, and affect, overstuffing the story" (111).
4. Conflict with daughters as Mori-san prepares to move
5. "Her behaviors tell a story of an entire life course of narrative events that became aesthetically entrenched as she grew older" (114).
6. Keeping things = fear of abandonment

 

IV. Temporal Dimensions of Aging

Drawing exercise: Draw an imaginary map of your life (past, present and future). Please briefly explain your images on the drawing.

A. "new ways of experiencing the passing of time" (91)
B. Capacity to yield, yuzuri

1. Obasuteyama story
2. Conflict between time moving forward and being cyclical
3. Mori-san does not embrace yielding
4. Embracing transience and indeterminacy can provide opportunities for agency and creativity in the flow of loss and renewal

C. Yamada, Yoko, and Yoshinobu Kato. 2006. "Images of Circular Time and Spiral Repetition: The Generative Life Cycle Model." Culture and Psychology 12(2): 143-160.

1. Japanese university students drew life maps
2. Two patterns

a. "Ascendant: Many students depicted their lives using images of progress and ascent. This represents linear progressivism and individualism, which is in accord with Western models of developmental psychology" (146).
b. "Circular: A number of images were classified as representing the cyclical nature of life" (146)

3. Drawing of a tree (quotes below are from page 147)

a. "A tree, and nothing else, is presented (i.e. in the beginning, an ecological context preexists)."
b. "The tree begins to bear fruit. The first fruit (former generations) is very beautiful. The fruit that is me (myself) has not appeared yet."
c. "The fruit that is me appears in this phase."
d. "The fruit that is me is not picked and remains on the tree."
e. "The fruit that is me has fallen to the earth (death)."
f. "After my death, the fruit that is me nourishes the earth, and this will continue in subsequent generations in an ecological context"

D. Danely: both models are present

1. Aging as older generations yield to younger (linear)
2. Aging as reciprocity, younger people depend on older (cyclical)

E. Your drawing?
F. Yamada and Kato: linear and cyclical can co-exist

1. Apples are unique, but seasonal cycle produces apples (91-2)
2. Buddhist notion of change, flux

G. Kitano-san

1. Husband died a long time ago
2. Change over time in daily ritual of memorialization: long sutras --> "see you there"
3. 50-year limit on mourning
4. Children will take over ritual responsibility
5. Economy of care
6. Grief absorbed as part of subjectivity

H. Abandonment and risk

1. Lack of coresidence
2. Emphasis on interdependence and group cohesion (104).

 

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