Transience and Transcendence in an Aging Japan

Jason Danely

Rhode Island College

In Japanese poetry and philosophy, the moon is a symbol of hope-- beautiful yet transient, an illusion that leads to transcendence, all reflection and shadow. It is a fitting representation of the temporal suspense offered by hope, particularly when hope is truly fleeting. For many older adults living in Japan today, longevity brings troubling anticipation of chronic illness, dependence, and loneliness. Care is uncertain, and connections with others more fragile. One way older adults find meaning in the midst of the social precarity of an aging society (represented by, among other things, the prospect of boke and kodokushi) is to cultivate a sensitivity towards symbols, feelings, and aesthetics of transience and transcendence. This paper explores the ways transience and transcendence are performed by examining rituals of mourning and memorialization conducted by older adults. Not only are transience and transcendence comforting spiritual concepts for those dealing with loss, but they also form an aesthetic appreciation of the world rooted in familiar Japanese ways of being in the world. In interviews, older adults described this sensitivity as a "sense" of invisible or imperceptible things, including the spirits of the departed, typically beginning around the age of 50. This spiritual-aesthetic sense of the world generates a hopeful intimacy and empathy with the departed arising out of the challenges of old age. A Japanese perspective on hope, then, is also a perspective on mourning, loss, and aesthetics.

 

 “It would be good if there was the right person (Ii hito ga itara...)”: Hope towards - and beyond – marriage

Laura Dales

University of Western Australia

 

Though we place them insistently in the individual, neither desire nor hope can be removed from social engagement and implication (Crapanzano 2003, p.26)

 

In a low-fertility, hyper-aged society where extramarital fertility is almost negligible, discussions of marriage and marriageability are multifaceted. Macro questions of a sustainable population and economic growth dovetail with more micro concerns relating to gender norms, career paths and family relations. The desire to marry is shaped by exposure to public discourses: of marriage and marriageability, of ideal femininities and masculinities, and more generally, what it means to be an adult (shakaijin) in Japan. Engagement with this discourse necessitates a sense of hope that is not only future-bound, but rather enjoins a present/ ongoing sense of perseverance despite difficulty (gaman).

In this paper I examine hope in the context of unmarried Japanese women and men’s lives, specifically in relation to marriage and marriageability. Drawing on interviews and fieldwork conducted over the last three years, I explore the relationship between hope and agency, defined broadly as “the socioculturally mediated capacity to act” (Ahearn 2001, p.112). I explore the ways that discussions of marriage elicit ways of being and thinking that lend themselves to hopefulness, independently of the actuality of marriage as an outcome. I suggest that in a climate of perceived decline, marriage desire and marriageability might be understood as pragmatic engagements with present as well as future. These engagements locate unmarried individuals within a discursive web that centres on marriage, but also connects those at the peripheries. This paper thus considers the multiple possibilities of hope: as enabling and disabling, and as both means and ultimate end (Moore 2011, p.153).

 

Hope within Japan's Agricultural Sector? The Kyoto Place Brand

Greg de St. Maurice

University of Pittsburgh

 

The sustainability of Japan's agricultural sector faces serious challenges. Worrisome trends include an abundance of aging farmers lacking clear successors, the depopulation of rural areas, the abandonment and conversion of agricultural land to other uses, a workforce engaged in farming predominantly part-time, and a national self-sufficiency rate for food that hovers around 40 per cent. In this context, there is concern that Japan's participation in the Trans-Pacific Partnership agreement negotiations aiming to liberalize trade between 12 member countries could spell the end of Japanese agriculture.

In this paper, I consider the hope that exists for Japanese agriculture from the perspective of actors involved in the Kyoto Prefecture’s local agricultural economy. Farms in Kyoto Prefecture are ill equipped to compete in terms of price because with comparatively little arable land distributed in scattered plots they do not enjoy an economy of scale. Nevertheless, some farmers and local officials see room for hope even should Japan open up its markets further to agricultural imports. Kyoto's strong brand power has meant that Kyoto's agricultural and food products fetch higher prices than those from other areas. The Kyoto brand has helped farmers facing difficulties before, as when the national government decided to engage in liberalization of the rice industry. Informed by over 18 months of fieldwork in Japan, this paper ethnographically explores the hopeful possibilities presented by branding, as well as concomitant fears and limitations. This paper also examines the communal aspects of hope as well as its relation to uncertainty, knowledge, and economic and social values.

 

The Hope for Medical Interpretation for Deaf People (and Foreigners)
Steven C. Fedorowicz
Kansai Gaidai University

A new city hospital in Hirakata-shi, Osaka is scheduled to open in 2014. In 2011, a small group of deaf citizens decided that the timing was right to request a service to be implemented at the new hospital they lacked and desperately needed – medical interpretation in Japanese Sign Language (JSL). The group figured it could strengthen their position by aligning themselves with foreign residents in the city. By including foreigners, the group’s goals broadened “to change the city to be friendly to every citizen with a secured and comfortable life… [and] to ensure easy access for the hearing impaired and foreign residents to medical care” (The First Forum flyer). One of the first strategies to recruit foreigners was to elicit the assistance of an American anthropologist fluent in JSL. Public forums were scheduled featuring doctors, professors, interpreters and other specialists to discuss the need and future prospects of medical interpretation. Initially there were feelings of optimism and great hope that policies and services crafted locally would ultimately serve as a template for medical interpretation in other areas in Japan as well. However, the planning and implementation of the forums proved to be extremely challenging. Personal and political rifts between deaf people, interpreters and others added to the difficulties of increasingly unfocused goals and strategies. This presentation will be an auto-ethnographic account of the highs and lows of the group’s efforts from the perspective of the American anthropologist struggling to balance research and activism.

 

An Attitude of Hope: Crafting Networks of Support in an Aging Community

Iza Kavedžija

Osaka University

 

Unprecedented life expectancy and associated demographic changes have led to widespread anxieties about aging on the national level, in the local communities, as well as on the personal level. The communities and individuals respond to the challenges of aging and care in older age in various and imaginative ways, crafting networks of support and strengthening a range of social ties. In this paper I present a case of a community in South Osaka, chosen for a high proportion of elderly population and describe some of the networks of support in the neighbourhood, focusing particularly on a Non-Profit Organization (NPO) providing services for the elderly. I describe the beginnings of the organization which started as a ‘tasukeai’ or a mutual aid network inspired by ideas of a well-known social activist Hotta Tsutomu. I focus on the activities and motivations of people involved in the networks of support, many of whom are themselves elderly or concerned about aging. In doing so I explore the organizational and broader social context within which hope arises and move to explore the motivations of the people involved, and what I term an ‘attitude of hope’. In approaching hope as an attitude that affects people’s actions and experiences, I draw on the phenomenological approaches (Husserl 1962; Duranti 2009; Throop 2010) focusing on changes in modes of attunement to different situations depending on one’s perspective. I argue that for the people involved in the community activities and support networks hope is not a form of passive resignation, but rather an active  attitude. In words of Paolo Freire: ‘hope as an ontological need, demands anchoring in practice… just to hope is to hope in vain’ (1994:2). 

 

 

Karoshi, Worker Hopes, and Japan’s Cultures of Care

Scott North

Osaka University

 

Japanese cultural tradition holds superiors responsible for the well-being of subordinates and the “right to benevolence” has been the prime consolation for those lower in the social order. Over the last 30 years, citizens’ groups and labor lawyers have combined medicine and law with this cultural right to benevolence in lawsuits designed to reign in corporate practices and improve working conditions. This paper considers several of these key cases of karoshi (death from overwork) and their effects on reform of standards for granting workers’ compensation payments. If work is recognized as cause of death, Japanese law provides state support for victims’ families, aiding them in suing employers for damages as well. Since the first cases of karoshi were “diagnosed” in the 1970s, the medical explanation and possibility of state compensation for the deaths has been a profound source of hope for victims’ families. Japanese courts, including the Supreme Court, have gradually recognized such worker claims and expanded the conception of employer responsibility for worker health to include accumulated fatigue and mental health. However, at the same time, employment relationships have been redefined away from the authority-rank style, in which the benevolence of superiors could be hoped for, becoming increasingly based on the logic of market-pricing, in which benevolence cannot be presumed. The rise of karoshi and the medico-legal movement to use litigation to secure compensation parallels the shift toward market-centered employment relationships. While these two historical moments mark the decline of one sort of hope (the hope of benevolence), they also mark the rise of hopes for social justice through citizen participation in the political process and recognition of individual worth as the foundation of a welfare state based on an inclusive ethic of care. Against this hope, new forms of exploitation (deskilling and degradation) continue to appear. This is nothing new. As in 19th century European workers’ movements, deaths from overwork in Japan motivate working people to take a hand in creating cultures of care they can feel entitled to hope for.

 

Hope of Prevention, Burden of Care: Temporalities of Japan’s Aging Society Crisis

Ender Ricart

University of Chicago

 

Japan is currently facing an “Aging Society Crisis” (shōshikōreika shakai mondai). By adopting an epidemiological approach that regards certain conditions of old age, namely conditions that render persons dependent and in need of care, as potentially preventable through health education, early detection, and various programs and services that facilitate healthy lifestyle and living environment, the national and local government and aging studies related scientists and academics have found hope. Hope that through the action of prevention they may be able to decrease the numbers of elderly enrolled in Japan’s national Long Term Care Insurance and thereby lighten the economic burdens of care. As I will discuss, prevention is a schema of hope – a type of action motivated by an anticipatory future that effects change in the present, moving it towards a new and emergent regime of operative solidarity. This potential future, the Aging Society Crisis, acts as a kind of energetic force, an orienting principle, and the act of prevention is a manifestation of its self-conditioning emergence. I will analytically frame this discussion of prevention as a schema of hope in relation to spatial and temporal arrangements within the emerging order of Japan’s Aging Society Crisis. Particularly the spatial organization and temporal signature of prevention as it is differentiated from, but not necessarily contrasted with the temporal and spatial orders of care. How does the Aging Society Crisis think aging bodies, sociality and environments in its two primary manifestations of prevention and care?

 

Building a Mystery: Hope and Identity in the Pipe-Porridge Ritual of Suwa Taisha

Stephen Robertson

 

Like hope, faith-based revelation through mantic practice can act as a source of “prospective momentum” (Miyazaki 2004) by providing a referential basis for personal agency. Unlike hope, the knowledge claims made by divination foreclose on future possibilities by shaping the circumstances in which they are realized, and by establishing relations of obligation and authority between the querent and diviner regardless of the accuracy of the claims themselves.

This paper explores this conceptual tension through an ethnographic study of a folk observance within the Japanese religio-cultural framework of Shintō belief. Specifically, I examine a particular instance of the widespread “pipe-porridge ritual” (tsutsugayu shinji), in which bundles of hollow reeds or bamboo are boiled to forecast crop performance in the coming year. While Japan’s industrialization in the twentieth century and shift away from an agricultural economy has largely drained the ritual of any pragmatic meaning, renewed interest in the popular media since 2007 suggests a contemporary relevance that transcends antiquarian interest.

By juxtaposing historical references to the ritual with contemporary media representations, interviews with ritual specialists, and my own observations of the ritual during fieldwork in 2009, I argue for its renewed social efficacy as a generator of difference, contributing to local identity discourse in a way that offers the hope of distinction in a decentralizing Japan. I conclude with a suggestion by analogy of the broader implications of predictive knowledge claims and academic authority.

 

Hope against Hope: Science as Labor in Contemporary Japan

Ieva Tretjuka

University of Pittsburgh/Osaka University

 

As a sense of insecurity and uncertainty about the future sustainability of Japan has been increasingly exacerbated in the wake of prolonged economic recession, contemporary political and popular discourses mobilize scientists as innovators of technologies that are not only profitable, but also essential to the continuity of the country. The recent science and technology policies in Japan posit development of “excellent human resources” as one of the bases of scientific innovation. However, while scientists are tasked with the production of technologies that would ensure socio-economic security in Japan's future, their labor conditions are becoming more insecure amidst the increase in performance-based research institutions, focus on short-term projects and flexible employment.

My paper operationalizes the category of “hope” to investigate meanings scientists imbue in their work in an era of growing socio-economic uncertainty. Based on an ethnographic study among young scientists – those most affected by the transformations in scientific labor regimes – in various public research institutions in Japan, I aim to explore how the daily lives of researchers are permeated with the “coupling of hope and hopelessness” (Zigon 2009) regarding their personal work futures. I suggest that, under the conditions of continuous withdrawal of job security and disappearance of permanent work structures, it is the responsibility to hope that allows for the “bargaining with normalcy” (Berlant 2007) among young scientists.

 

Japan’s alternative labor activists in the era of neoliberalism

Charles Weathers

Osaka City University 

 

My paper emphasizes how labor activists persevere in efforts to organize and represent disadvantaged workers in a difficult environment. Mainstream unions have long been closely cooperative with managers, and have usually failed to represent the most disadvantaged workers, especially women, small-firm employees, and foreign workers. To fill the gap, so-called community unions arose in the early 1980s to represent disadvantaged workers, notably the growing ranks of part-time women. Today, the non-mainstream (or alternative) labor movement is much better regarded than the mainstream union movement, but commands only limited resources.

Leftist labor activists confront a hostile environment. Structurally, state and corporate recognition of cooperative enterprise unions makes it difficult for independent organizations to operate. Socially, organizing individual workers in a group-oriented society is difficult. In addition, the tradition of protest in Japan weakened drastically following the left’s setbacks in the mid-1970s, making it difficult to sustain progressive campaigns or use aggressive tactics.

Nevertheless, activists persist. Drawing on several years of fieldwork, regular contacts with alternative activists, and left-wing periodicals such Rodo Joho (Labor Information), I describe how desires to establish social justice and reduce inequality motivates activists to continue efforts, despite frequent setbacks. While the flow of events, notably the strong recent political victories of neoliberals, presently runs against left-wing activists, I also note that they have achieved important successes that continue to motivate members. Indeed, incremental progress, along with a desire to improve society for future generations, are important motivators to many committed activists. 

 

Balancing the “Father” and the “Worker”: A Content Analysis of Letters Written by Fathers Who Took a Parental Leave

Saori Yasumoto and Yoshie Sano

Osaka University       Washington State University

 

Although the idea of gender equality has been widespread in Japan in the last couple of decades, researchers reported that Japanese work places still practice the patriarchal culture (i.e., the number of male managerial position outweigh its female managerial position, men tend to posit a permanent position whereas women tend to hold a temporary position). How do men negotiate their identities between a worker and father under such an environment? The extant research discusses the ways men’s involvement in family life positively impact their identity as a father; however, the explanation about the impact of men’s involvement at home on their worker’s identity is limited. By conducting a content analysis of 84 letters written by Japanese fathers who took a parental leave, I thus examined the ways fathers perceive the influence of childcare experience on their identity as a worker. Based on the analysis, I found that fathers tend to describe that they became a better worker through the experience of taking a parental leave because they acquired three efficient skills: (1) concentration; (2) communication; and (3) multitasking. The message from fathers suggests the importance of maintaining the image of excellent employee to survive in the current labor market, while placing their effort to become a family man. Although fathers are often blamed for the lack of involvement in family life, the finding implies that the patriarchal work culture interferes fathers to balance between work and family.