A preliminary exploration of attitudes about COVID-19 among a group of older people in Iwate Prefecture, Japan.

In this article, our goal is to provide researchers with a non-western perspective concerning the COVID-19 pandemic through a qualitative study of older adults living in Iwate, a prefecture in Japan that has only recently (27 July 2020) reported its first confirmed COVID-19 cases and which has experienced comparatively few cases since. Because they live in an environment with few COVID-19 cases, the individuals in this study provide an interesting perspective of the pandemic as it is unfolding in rural Japan and our focus here is on documenting the circumstances and ideas of elder residents of Iwate Prefecture to understand individual experiences of this population. Our intention here is to provide data and tentative analysis that may be useful in developing more complex cross-cultural studies related to the lived experience of COVID-19 among older people.

Reviewing Japanese Concepts of Amae and Ie to Deeper Understand the Relevance of Secure-Base Behavior in the Context of Japanese Caregiver-Child Interactions.

Attachment theorists believe that children rely on their caregivers for protection and exploration. Due to this emphasis on independent exploration, however, the extent to which this notion of secure-base behavior is valid in societies emphasizing belongingness, such as Japan, has been questioned. By conducting an in-depth exploration of two Japanese collectivistic concepts, amae and ie, the present paper reexamines the relevance of secure-base behavior in Japan. Current discussions of amae have relied on psychoanalytic concepts that were developed in Western culture, and thus may not accurately represent Japanese parent-child relations. By examining another traditional concept of the family system, ie, this paper proposes that attachment theory is relevant in Japanese culture because children's individual competence is important to their families.

Mental health, suicide, and self-centered behavior: focus on the japanese family and the elderly.

My mother-in-law is very selfish because she has been living alone for a long time. She is so used to living alone that she thinks nothing of doing things like vacuuming at midnight. My mother-in-law only talks about herself and doesn't seem very interested in her son or what other people say or are doing. This makes it difficult to interact and communicate with her. I do not want to take care of my mother-in-law should she become ill and this is something I think about, since my husband is the eldest son.

Irony and the sociocultural construction of old age in South Korea: perspectives from government, the medical profession, and the aged.

This article explores the intersection between discourses with multiple meanings that relate to the cultural construction of elder identities in South Korea. The authors explore the experiences of elder patients at a free clinic to consider how government policy, attitudes among biomedical professionals, and elders themselves come into contact and influence the experiences of older Koreans within the national health care system. The study is ethnographic, using interview data to examine how the identities of elder Koreans are being shifted from "weak and in need of care" to "potentially problematic consumer" and how governmental policies both stimulate and respond to that shift. By focusing on the situational status of the elderly, this article is intended to represent the voices of some elderly, voices that can be submerged within the process of decision making related to public policy.

From socially weak to potential consumer: changing discourses on elder status in South Korea.

This article explores social and political dimensions associated with providing care for elders in South Korea. We look at changes in welfare policy since the 1980s and discuss the emergence ofa long-term care insurance program in Korea similar to the program promulgated in Japan in 2000. We argue that while the status of South Korean elderly is undergoing change as new policies provide opportunities for elders to move from positions of dependency to increased independence as consumers of health care services, there are some reasons for concern. The capacity of elders to function as consumers remains tied to the fact family members or elders themselves must pay supplements to their health insurance premiums as well as significant co-payments for services rendered and government policies retain a strong bias toward requiring in-home, family-centered care of frail and bedfast elders.

Group homes for elders with dementia in Japan.

In this article we explore the development of group homes for elders with dementia in Japan since the inception of the long-term care insurance program in 2000. We suggest that the combination of demographic and policy trends in recent years have created a context in which entrepreneurial activities related to elder care have increased significantly. By focusing on one of the new institutions that has emerged, we show one way in which social policy has had a significant influence on the lives of elders suffering from dementia and their families. Finally, we point out some of the problems that have arisen along with the growth of these new forms of care, such as a lack of involvement by family members in visiting and caring for elders.

Power, family, and filial responsibility related to elder care in rural Japan.

This article explores the discourse on filial responsibility as it intersects with familial roles and power relationships as represented by women living in rural Japan. Using case studies, I consider some of the intergenerational and intragenerational issues that arise as Japanese women contemplate or attempt to cope with care of elder parents and consider the manner in which the concept of filial piety, or filial responsibility, is expressed and conceptualized in relation to these issues. I argue that many continue to think about elder care in ways that emphasize the responsibility of children to care for their parents, but that the discourse on filial piety is continually constructed and reconstructed as people provide and contest roles associated with elder care, both from the perspective of the child and from that of the parents. To explore these issues, I consider the cases of two women who were facing issues related to provision of care to elder parents and who structured these in terms of notions about filial responsibility. The cases were obtained during extended fieldwork in an agricultural community in northern Japan.

Cultural factors in dementia: perspectives from the anthropology of aging.

The plasticity of cultural constructs of dementia is shown in two societies: Japan, and an American Indian nation. By demedicalizing the analysis of dementia, the social and cultural factors that influence recognition of symptoms, help-seeking strategies, caregiving behaviors, and adherence to biomedical and sociocultural coping advice become more obvious. Notably in the Japanese example, motivation toward primary prevention behavior is clear in the context of boke since it is an undesirable condition of frailty and cognitive decline considered to be preventable by remaining active. In the American Indian example, the hallucinatory symptoms are positively valued communications with the "other side" rather than pathologically defined. The findings show the need to extend dementia models beyond the biomedical in order to optimize prevention and management of this complex, chronic condition.

Interpreting senility: cross-cultural perspectives.

In general, senility in American society is seen through the lens of biomedicine and conceptualized in terms of physical changes in the person. Research on attitudes about senility in other cultures shows that this is not the only way to conceptualize cognitive change in later life. This article explores cultural aspects related to cognitive change in old age by focusing on ethnographic examples from Japan. I argue that in Japan the social concepts related to defining the person are emphasized when thinking about cognitive change in later life, rather than biomedical concepts associated with pathologies of the brain. In part because of this focus, for older Japanese senility is often viewed as being a moral category as much as a category of disease.

Introduction: Aging in Asia--perennial concerns on support and caring for the old.

This introductory article provides background to an understanding of "Aging in Asia," focusing on the demographics of population aging in Asia. It discusses the differences in the magnitude of the aged population in different parts of Asia and highlights the perennial concerns of care and support facing the aged and their families as Asian societies grapple with the graying population. Globalization is one important factor presenting new challenges as well as opportunities to aging Asia. The introduction substantiates the discussions in this special issue, which range from an examination of broad issues of support for the aged and policy directions in East and Southeast Asia, to specific concerns relating to activity and elderly in Singapore, intergenerational relationships in Korea, and issues concerning caregiving of the old in Singapore.

Culture and long-term care: the bath as social service in Japan.

A central feature of Japan's approach to community-based care of the elderly, including long-term home health care, is the emphasis on providing bath facilities. For mobile elders, senior centers typically provide a public bathing facility in which people can enjoy a relaxing soak along with friends who also visit the centers. In terms of in-home long-term care, visiting bath services are provided to assist family care providers with the difflcult task of bathing a frail or disabled elder--a task made more problematic as a result of the Japanese style of bathing. I argue that the bath, as social service, is a culturally shaped solution to a specific problem of elder care that arises in the Japanese context as a result of the importance of the bath in everyday life for Japanese. While the services may be considered specific to Japan, some aspects of bathing services, particularly the mobile bath service, may also have applicability in the United States.

Independence, Security, and the intergenerational social contract: home-helper services and elder care in rural Japan.

For several years, demographic trends and changing ideas about responsibilities for elder care in Japan have contributed to the desire, or need, for families to seek out new care approaches. This article focuses on one alternative to traditional approaches to caring for elder family members--the home-helper program that is available through the Japanese long-term care insurance program. Using ethnographic data collected in northern Japan, it will be argued that the home-helper program forms a compensatory elder care system that is intended to augment family-provided care and social support, rather than to promote independent living. This compensatory approach to elder care is based upon an intergenerational social contract in which it is assumed that some degree of dependence on family members is both an expected and preferred outcome of growing old.

Senility as disintegrated person in Japan.

This article focuses upon the intersection of Japanese concepts of person, mind and body and ideas about senile dementia. Questions explored include: How do Japanese ideas about person, in terms of the relationship between mind and body, differ from those generally accepted in the Euro-American world? And how do these ideas influence Japanese conceptualizations of senility? I argue that gerontologists and others concerned with the treatment and understanding of senility from a cross-cultural perspective need to pay close attention to how the person, as an ontological concept of being, is perceived and constructed in different contexts. The manner in which people in different cultures conceptualize the nature of human being will inevitably have a significant influence on how they perceive and experience senility. The data for this article were collected during more than two years of ethnographic fieldwork in northern Japan.