Aging and Loss

Jason Danely

• Publisher: Rutgers University Press
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9780813572697
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Cultural & Social Anthropology
• Index: Social Sciences

By 2030, over 30% of the Japanese population will be 65 or older, foreshadowing the demographic changes occurring elsewhere in Asia and around the world.  What can we learn from a study of the aging population of Japan and how can these findings inform a path forward for the elderly, their families, and for policy makers?
 
Based on nearly a decade of research,   Aging and Loss examines how the landscape of aging is felt, understood, and embodied by older adults themselves. In detailed portraits, anthropologist Jason Danely delves into the everyday lives of older Japanese adults as they construct narratives through acts of reminiscence, social engagement and ritual practice, and reveals the pervasive cultural aesthetic of loss and of being a burden.   Through first-hand accounts of rituals in homes, cemeteries, and religious centers, Danely argues that what he calls the self-in-suspense can lead to the emergence of creative participation in an economy of care. In everyday rituals for the spirits, older adults exercise agency and reinterpret concerns of social abandonment within a meaningful cultural narrative and, by reimagining themselves and their place in the family through these rituals, older adults in Japan challenge popular attitudes about eldercare. Danely’s discussion of health and long-term care policy, and community welfare organizations, reveal a complex picture of Japan’s aging society. 

Part I

Loss

Chapter 1

Loss, Abandonment, and Aesthetics

When I returned to Kyoto in 2013, I stepped into one of the small cafés where I often met with older men and women when I began my research eight years earlier. The proprietress, Tachibana-san, her long silver hair pulled back with a flower patterned bandana, inquired about my research as she prepared a warm cup of tea, and after chatting a bit, I asked her what she thought was most important to include in a book about aging in Japan. She set the teacup on the table in front of me and began, “Being old means first of all that, well, the people around you and that you have lived with over your life, they go away (inaku naru). I think that among older people that feeling of loss (sūshitsukan) is really important.” She returned to the kitchen and changed the CD, and soon the gentle sadness of a popular ballad, “Do Not Stand at My Grave and Weep” (“Sen no Kaze ni Natte”), came drifting from the speakers. Full of loss, yet beautiful and moving, the lyrics of the song, sung from the point of view of the spirit of the deceased, comforted us with images of nature, repeating “do not stand at my grave and weep, I am not there, I have not died.”

Aging and loss are not newly emergent twenty-first-century phenomena. Japanese people have been performing the stories of aging, loss, and the world beyond for centuries. In these stories, old age is not only a time of grief, mutability, and renunciation (Washburn 2011), but also a time when one may feel estranged from one’s family and community, and must learn to find solace among the spirits of the dead. Phrases such as “old soul” (oi no tamashi; Kurihara 1986) and “at 60, one returns to the ancestors” (rokuju de senzo ni kaeru; Formanek 1988, 13, quoted in Young and Ikeuchi 1997, 233) suggest both a “return” to and “changing into” a spirit. Perhaps that is why Tachibana-san thought of loss and mourning as such an important part of aging, and why the song “Do Not Stand at My Grave and Weep” was so meaningful. Grave visits and other rituals of memorialization were among the most intimate ways Japanese older adults offer and express care in late life, placing a small bowl of rice on family altar (butsudan), affectionately imagining the faces of the departed, gently pouring water over their graves. This mourning that links memorial to maturity is the topic of this book.

Even these simple acts, however, were complicated by the aging of Japan’s population, by political and economic changes, by new technologies and options for dying and for being remembered. Japanese social welfare policies and programs of care remain unevenly apportioned for the growing need, and while some bring their concerns to the spirits and Buddhas, others find themselves removed from an economy of care and support, feeling alone or abandoned. In Japanese stories of old age, the older person is left behind not only by those who have died, but also by the living.

While policies and demographics have changed, the ambivalence between care and abandonment of the old is not new. These stories of abandonment and loss in old age are known as obasuteyama, or “The Mountain of the Deserted Crone.” Even today, one can go almost anywhere in Japan and find that people are familiar with the story and the central event in its plot: a son carrying his aged mother into the mountains, where he abandons her to die. Before delving into the stories of mourning and maturity in contemporary Japan, I think it is worth briefly examining obasuteyama here.

In obasuteyama, the details leading up to the old woman’s abandonment, the events that transpire after she is left behind, and even the nature of the journey up the mountain can be radically different depending on the iteration. The prototypical version of obasuteyama takes place in a rural village, in the mountainous Japanese countryside. Due to ecological, sociopolitical, personal, or generational pressures (or a combination these), a family makes the decision to abandon the old woman of the house high up in the mountains.¹

The task of delivering the woman to the mountain falls on the woman’s son (sometimes at the encouragement of his wife). While many of the details in the story vary, every version includes the middle-aged son carrying his old mother on his back as he ascends a steep, thickly wooded path, the moonlight filtering through the trees. What’s even more remarkable is that the old woman does not protest her abandonment. In some versions, she even breaks off small branches as they ascend, so that her son can find his way back safely. In other cases, the son’s actions are socially sanctioned, but sometimes this is less clear. In many versions of the story, the old woman is able to return from the mountain, but more often she remains deserted, transforming into a stone, a mountain witch (yamauba), a ghostly spirit lingering forlorn in the melancholy moonlight, or perhaps an honored ancestor (Reider 2011).

What can a story like obasuteyama, and all of its iterations and reconstructions over the centuries, tell us about aging and loss in the lives of older adults in twenty-first-century Japan? Do older Japanese adults perceive themselves as “abandoned,” like the woman in the story, and if so, what does abandonment mean in the context of current discourses on aging, welfare, care, and the family? How do older adults shape their own personal experiences of loss through everyday practices such as rituals of mourning and memorialization?

First, it should be mentioned that obasuteyama is not meant as a historical record of actual practices, though abandonment or other forms of selective neglect of older adult dependents has been well documented in anthropological studies of many societies across the world (Glascock and Feinman 1981; Willerslev 2009). Obasuteyama may have come to incorporate themes from local practices of separation of older age grades to the periphery or beliefs in the mountains as places where the dead reside, but the actual situation described in obasuteyama does not to appear to have ever been historically verified for Japan (Yoshikawa 1998), nor does it fit with any patterns of gender dependence and mortality recorded during the premodern period (Cornell 1991). The story has nonetheless remained popular, acted out in numerous stage dramas and films, as well as short stories and even graphic novels (manga). Part of the continued interest in obasuteyama is no doubt due to this malleability and reiterability, its constant renewal and reinvention. It also continues to speak to the deep ambivalence regarding old age (Huang 2011; Kurihara 1986; Reider 2011; Skord 1989; Tsuji 1997; Washburn 2011) and the complex emotions that arise (for both the old woman and her son) when weighing the burden of care, the obligations and debts to family, the spiritual value of sacrifice (gisei) and yielding (yuzuri).

Let us consider stories of abandonment from a cultural and psychodynamic perspective. Several scholars who have looked at the genre of obasuteyama folktales, most notably Nishizawa Shigejiro’s Obasuteyama Shinkō (1936) and Yanagita Kunio’s Obasuteyama ([1945] 1979), suggest that obasuteyama resonates with deeply felt orientations toward aging, death, and the family in Japanese society. Evelyn Huang (2011), in an exhaustive review of research on obasuteyama stories across Asia, concludes that although many aspects of the tale may have originated outside of Japan (versions have been traced to India, China, and Korea), Japanese versions tend to concentrate on the emotional weight of the parent-child bond and the deep emotional pain of the son. From this observation, Huang wonders, “Does the tale of Obasuteyama serve as a relief tool when one faces the burden of elderly care?” In other words, the feelings generated from abandonment (including guilt and shame) may actually preserve a bond based in care, while keeping other, more destructive feelings, wishes, and fantasies (that would transform the mother into an object of hate) from erupting from the stress of continued care. The ambiguity in the fate of the abandoned mother in many Japanese versions of the story and the sense of relief felt by the son (physically and emotionally) after abandoning his mother seem to support Huang’s interpretation, and yet such a conclusion remains difficult to comprehend in the contemporary context without a clearer understanding of Japanese attitudes toward aging, loss, care, and the family.

Anthropologist John W. Traphagan’s (2013) interpretation of obasuteyama in Japan concentrates less on emotions and more on philosophical and ethical dimensions of elder abandonment. Traphagan’s view is consistent with Huang’s conclusions in that it places the act of abandonment within a Japanese aesthetic framework that values collectivity and interdependence above the desires of an autonomous individual (2013, 130–134). The care of the kin group as a whole overtakes the obligation to care for the very old. While a Western observer might be appalled at what New York Times film critic A. H. Weiler (1961) called “the custom, harshly implacable to Occidental eyes” of taking the old to the mountain, a Japanese audience might empathize with the pathos (aware) of self-sacrifice for a greater good. Traphagan’s aesthetic reframing of the story echoes Ruth Benedict’s ([1946] 1974, 193) observation of Japanese dramatic sensibility: “There need be no happy ending. Pity and sympathy for the self-sacrificing hero and heroine has full right of way. Their suffering is no judgment of God upon them. It shows that they have fulfilled their duty at all costs and allowed nothing—not abandonment or sickness or death—to divert them from the true path.”

The “true path” comes at the cost of personal suffering; in the case of obasuteyama, the son’s path to authority as household head and the responsibility for provisioning descendants comes at the cost of abandoning the elders. The old woman herself must also feel some emotional conflict, and yet she yields to her son, as if to ease his shame, or to transmit the message that her old body no longer has a place among the living. Emotional conflicts as well as connections between the aged parent and her successors emerged in my conversations with older Japanese adults; I came to see obasuteyama as a window into the thoughts and feelings of older adults still face today: fear of being a burden, wishing to yield, yet dreading abandonment, shame, hope. These thoughts and feelings, while evident among older adults across the world, are also shaped by and internalized as a unique array of cultural images, practices, and discourses with a particular social and historical heritage. The most prominent way in which Japanese culture shapes and is shaped by the experiences of older adults is through images and ritual practices for the ancestors and spirits of the family dead, which I group together as memorialization.

Memorialization alleviates and reconfigures the emotional costs of upholding social institutions of kinship and succession, and is worth examining in greater depth, especially as it helps us to understand the emotions and subjectivities of older Japanese adults today. The emotional tension depicted in obasuteyama bears a close resemblance to Meyer Fortes’s (1967; 1976) descriptions of family relationships among the Tallensi of West Africa. Fortes observed that old age among the Tallensi generated anxiety, especially among male heirs, since in order to keep an ordered tradition of succession, “parents must die, though they cannot but resist and fear this fate, so that children may continue the life they owe to their parents, and children must replace parents though they dare not consciously wish them out of the way” (1976, 14). Fortes saw rituals and taboos associated with the ancestors as cultural mechanisms for easing this tension between generations by “submitting to the reality of the death of the parents which removes them physically, and keeping them symbolically alive and at home among the displacing offspring” (1976, 14). While there are numerous differences in social structure and ritual observance between the Tallensi and the Japanese, the general observation that underlying tensions generated by kinship structures can be symbolically reworked though memorialization offers a fruitful starting point from which to engage the perspectives and practices of older adults.

The approaches of Traphagan and Fortes underline the need to examine older adult subjectivity as a process of psychological self-formation embedded within and inseperable from social practices and political structures. Building on this approach, I argue that ritual practices for the spirits of the dead cultivate an aesthetic discernment and subjectivity that can transform abandonment, estrangement, and loss into narratives of meaning, purpose, and connection in old age. As old age increasingly becomes an object of political and cultural significance, the locus of obasuteyama expands from kin and community to the larger political-economic structures and to the representations of aging and family that they produce. Aesthetic discernment is applied here as well, as older adults find spaces of hope within uncertainty, extending the self into the past (in mourning) and the future (in memorial) (see Lambek 1996). Looking at the experience of aging in this way allows us to situate the work of the self within a social and political world, and to see how the imagination of the “other world” constitutes the lived reality of this world.

SITUATING THIS STUDY

Kyoto City, where I conducted most of my research, is located in the Kinki region of western Honshū, which includes the major urban centers of Osaka and Kobe (Figure 1). It rests in the Kyoto Basin, surrounded on the north, west, and east sides by high mountains. Locals often referred back to the tree-covered mountainsides when making conversations about the timing of the changing seasons, heaving sighs in the humid air that becomes trapped there after the rainy season has ended, or when the cold air would blow in from Mt. Hiei during the winter. The proximity of mountains also provides the city with numerous fresh waterways, including the Katsura, Kamo, and Takano rivers. On nighttime walks to the convenience store near the house I rented in northeast Kyoto, I would be serenaded by frogs (which, I was instructed, say “kero-kero” in Japanese) against a gentle, faint underfoot burbling. Little wonder, I thought, that Kyoto’s inauguration as the capital of Japan began the “Period of Tranquility” (Heian Period 794–1185 CE).

Kyoto remained the official capital city of Japan until the late nineteenth century, and over its long history those same mountains and rivers that I became so fondly attached to have served as a backdrop to much of Japan’s cultural and artistic life, as well as history books full of religious uprisings, civil wars, and imperial intrigue (Dougill 2006). Kyoto was formally established as a municipality in 1898, and since then has been gradually expanding in area, incorporating more and more of the outlying towns and villages. When I began my fieldwork, the municipal boundaries stretched twenty-nine kilometers from east to west and forty-nine kilometers from north to south, encompassing an area of 827.9 square kilometers (City Planning for Kyoto City 2005, 2) that was home to over 1.47 million people (comparable in population to Philadelphia), representing roughly 650,000 households.

Figure 1. Map of Japan with detail of Kyoto. Image by Paul Stoub.

Before I left for the field, a Japanese friend of mine who had lived in Kyoto for a number of years told me that there are three kinds of people one meets in Kyoto: monks, students, and old people. She was not far from the truth. Kyoto is home to hundreds of Buddhist temples and several large universities. And older people were visible everywhere, in parks and buses, department stores, and busy city streets. Many neighborhoods have even erected traffic signs featuring the cartoon faces of an older man and woman identifying the area as a “Silver Zone.” Despite the image of Kyoto as a being full of older people, the city-wide percentage of the population over the age of sixty-five is only slightly above the national average, reaching 25.1 percent as of 2013 (Kyoto City General Planning Bureau Information Office of Statistical Data 2013).

Only a handful of ethnographies have been written in English on Kyoto’s local culture, usually focusing on individuals and families involved in traditional arts, crafts, and festivals (Brumann 2013; Dalby 1983; Hareven 2002; Pitelka 2005). As a city with a long history as a center of religious, artistic, and other cultural development, Kyoto was an excellent site to observe the interaction between cherished traditions and contemporary city life, the emanations of the local and the global. Although some families trace their Kyoto roots back several generations and claim a special authority and distinction, the majority of people I spoke with would not consider themselves to be truly from Kyoto, since their families have lived there for only four or five generations. Most older adults I spoke to had been in Kyoto long enough to have family graves in the city or close enough to make frequent visits and to conduct regular ceremonies for the spirits of the departed. (I discuss the significance of these places and rituals in greater detail in chapters 3 and 4.)

I began my fieldwork by conducting participant observation at two large senior welfare centers and two adult day care facilities, where I also regularly volunteered. I became active in my local neighborhood organization and the volunteer-run social welfare cooperative in the school district where I resided, which gave me access to about forty additional individuals sixty years or older, many of whom did not participate in senior centers and none of whom attended adult day care facilities. In a short amount of time, friends and acquaintances began offering introductions and more opportunities to meet other older men and women who were interested in discussing their thoughts on growing olde...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Part I. Loss
• Part II. Mourning
• Part III. Abandonment and Care
• Part IV. Hope
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index
• About the Author