This article examines how Japanese contest transition from middle to age in a small town. In contesting transition to age, people resist entrance into a period that is generally associated with increasingly dependent and potentially burdensome relationships with others. Age-grading practices not only contribute to defining point in life that marks transition from middle age to age, they also symbolically represent dominant discourse on age, and thus can be used as a basis upon which to resist engaging in that discourse. As older Japanese delay affiliation with elder age grade, they contest boundaries that define the old as a community of age peers. (Japan, aging, age-grading practices, age, anthropological gerontology, identity) In contrast to other parts of urban industrial world, Japan is unusual in exhibiting very clearly delineated periods of life course and limited variation in timing of transitions from one period to next (such as childhood to adulthood or middle age to age). Largely agricultural areas(2) are particularly notable because transitions are often organized around formal age-grading practices that structure timing of passages between periods in life course in terms of age-group membership. The movement from middle to age in Japanese context is ethnologically intriguing because it contrasts with other industrial countries, where age is usually downplayed or even legally prohibited as a criterion for differentiating older people on basis of antidiscriminatory or anti-ageist sentiment (e.g., Littlefield 1997; Frerichs and Naegele 1997; Campbell 1991). In Japan age is a legitimate criterion for differentiating elderly from other segments of society (Hashimoto 1996:40). A fundamental element defining elderly as a distinct age group can be found in idea that age is a time when people can legitimately expect to depend upon others for social and economic support--particularly their children, who are viewed as having an obligation to provide that support. Although one might expect that these social patterns would clear a path for uncomplicated passage into elder status, transition from middle age to age in Japan is not necessarily a smooth one. Many people contest adoption of a self-identity as rojin (old person) by delaying or resisting transition to age and identification with terms that directly index ascribed status as an person. Older people often state that there is a discontinuity between how they feel about their own age identities and how they are defined by public discourses that determine when one is considered old. They attribute this to dramatic mortality decline that has occurred in Japan since end of Pacific War. Older people note that in 1950s average life expectancy was much lower than it is today (in 1950, average life expectancy at birth for women was 63 years and for men 59 years; by 1994 these figures had increased to 83 years and 79 years, respectively).(3) Older people today comment that with an increase of years added to end of life course, one's sixties should be considered a part of middle age rather than age. In terms of both physical and mental characteristics of their identities, people state that while in their sixties they do not feel as though they have changed greatly from their fifties; any significant onset of functional decline associated with either normal or pathological aging(4) processes is not expected to develop until one has entered into one's seventies or eighties. Although demographic changes in Japan clearly play a role in people's perceptions of how life course should be partitioned, there is a further theme underlying this resistance. At a more subtle level, resistance to assuming identity of person is linked to social norms that regulate degree to which older people engage in dependent behavior. …
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Jan 1, 2019
Open Access