I. 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).

 

II. Kinship Dilemmas

A. Aesthetic restructuring as "creativity of loss": "recalibrating and transforming its [loss's] value, and producing new possible selves and relational worlds and form a sense of well-being" (133).
B. Economy of care centered on meaningful self-sacrifice (Ballad of Narayama): connects to kin, maintains social integrity, and it links generational and seasonal cycles (134).
C. Manga about man who moves his mother to her own apartment: negative economy of care
D. Caregiver fatigue

1. Son kills mother stories in the media
2. Elder abuse: half of respondents aged 75-85 to Ministry of Health, Labor, and Welfare survey (2004) reported abuse "resulting in detrimental mental or health effects" (140).
3. Caregivers experience physical, emotional, financial stress
4. Nursing homes as obasuteyama (141)

E. Managing uncertainty, abandonment anxiety: Nishida-san

1. Retired from weaving business at 60
2. Invests large initial pension allowance in new butsudan, rather than overseas vacation
3. Desire to be remembered after death
4. Butsudan has enhanced role: "similar to the grave, [the butsudan] confounds spatio-temporal states; memorial repeats the past into Nishida-san's future self, and as an object to be inherited, into the future selves of her children and grandchildren" (143).
5. Nishida-san prepares for her own mortuary rituals and helps others through social welfare association
6. Dying alone: "unsurprising consequences of an increasingly individuated generation of welfare consumers" (147)
7. Nishida-san rallies community to confront dilemmas of ritual
8. State needs Nishida-san's ritual labor because it can't provide broader services related to dying and death

F. Elder care

1. ie, residential family group

a. traditional center of social worlds
b. Bonds of intergenerational interdependence, obligation, emotion
c. Surprisingly, ie not central to elders' narratives of care. Instead: many sources

3. Government policies

a. 1973: national health insurance to provide free medical care to those over 60
b. By 1979: national care reduced because too expensive
c. "'Japanese-style welfare society'" based on traditional family system, communal cultural mindset (151)
d. Japanese officials criticize Scandinavian welfare states for abandoning elders to institutionalized professional care = obasuteyama (151)

4. Burden of care

a. On families
b. On elders: self-sufficient, work, social lives, self-care, family membership
c. Senior centers, clubs: "social community of either nostalgic leisure (singing songs or playing games enjoyed as children), or a future of active and stimulating 'successful aging' by learning something new, like English" (43).

G. Individualized choice

1. Self-reliance can involve agency
2. Place isn't obvious --> uncertainty: "Sometimes the grave and the butsudan were the only symbols of household succession left to anchor the ie, the only 'places' left for older adults" (153).

H. Missing centenarians: people over 100 whose deaths had not been registered

1. Japanese government: 234,354 missing centenarians (2010)
2. Missing? Death hastened? Fraud to get pension payments? Bureaucratic oversight?
3. Bureaucratic abandonment with family complicity = modern obasuteyama (155-6)

I. People die alone --> dilemmas of keeping life and death in order

 

III. Rituals of Care and Remembrance

A. Rituals envision and create good relationships of care in this world and with other world
B. New Year's ritual of pounding glutinous rice to make mochi

1. Men and boys pound, women distribute
2. Offered to Shinto deities and express wish for continuity by community
3. Men age into and out of roles: "the celebration of long life and interpersonal bonds, as well as the division of labor between generations and genders that performs an agency of yielding" (164).
4. What happens when not enough younger men? How can older men yield?

C. Death rituals

1. Mahayana Buddhism: bodhisattva, saint-like figures of compassion provide path to salvation without cycle of rebirth and merit
2. Folk belief: ancestor veneration, dead are buddhas (hotoke) to be aided on their journey by bodhisattvas and the living
3. Some spirits become honored ancestors, others are reborn
4. Shinto: death is polluting --> taboos, cremation
5. Remains kept on altar for at least 49 days, then moved to shared household grave

D. Butsudan offerings

1. Kitano-san: long sutras --> "see you there"
2. Rituals provide affection, intimacy, closeness, and peace (47)
Caring for the butsudan "was itself a reminder of one's position in the household, and of the transitions of the life cycle that all must eventually pass through" (55)

E. Memorialization = "work of self in mourning, recruiting, and reintegrating memories, impressions, and feelings of oneself and others, into a narrative of meaningful change" (56).
F. Symbolic interactions in ritual produce feelings of mourning that also are about giving; they are about placing the self between abandonment and hope (61)
G. Mori-san's dagger

1. Rusted, no handle, in a small wooden box
2. Had belonged to Mori-san's mother's father's brother, symbol of high status
3. Dagger held his heart and soul
4. Couldn't be disposed of with body because of cremation
5. Dagger resisted transience
6. Ritual disposal at a temple

a. Much like ritual for the dead, sutras pacified spirits that might be attached to dagger
b. Mori-san's relief: "'It's just not a good thing to keep leftover things in your heart'" (168).
c. Mori-san could redistribute things in an economy of care (168)

H. Spirits visit --> anxiety, but later in life --> care and acceptance
I. Gendered problems of yielding

1. Men worried about self becoming small
2. Obasuteyama story: women yield to sons

J. Divination after dagger ceremony

1. Problems in future: the move, son-in-law's father's illness
2. Mori-san's concerns are validated --> agency
3. Coming to terms with moving in and moving on

 

IV. Why Do Stories Matter?

A. Successful aging = timeless self
B. Japanese self ages because body, mind, and spirit overlap within bonds of relationships
C. Aging self seeks connection with past and other world
D. Conflict between connection and yielding
E. Aesthetic practices involving rituals, objects, and landscapes: "Memorialization at temples and graves, festivals, and butsudan provide ways for older adults to recognize loss and uncertainty in their own lives and to transform this experience of loss into the basis for building a secure connection to the other world, a sense of hope. Hope and comfort in old age come with seeing the faces of the departed, feeling their presence, opening oneself up to their power and care" (190).
F. Obasuteyama stories = narratives of possibility
G. Aesthetic practices open up aging and "challenge political marginalization and encourage a diversity of aging trajectories" (191).

1. Not just about body, medication robots, table tennis and English classes
2. New relationships, creative care
3. "The narratives of older adults in this book show that the cultivation of aesthetic discernment, of a mature sense of transience, interdependence, and openness in everyday life, can ground these subjectivities within a meaningful sense of being in the world.... A society that cares for the old must also find ways to care for caregivers, for families, and for communities that link them to larger systems of connectedness and value" (192).

H. Imagine one's being in other world, foster relationships that nourish and value that connection

Discussion activity: Seniors and dating at IKEA