Popular Portrayals Research Articles

Coloring America's Pastime: Sporting Life's Coverage of Race & the Emergence of Baseball's Color Line, 1883–1889

This study explores how race was covered within Sporting Life, one of the nation's first specialty sports publications, from the journal's inception in March 1883 until an unwritten “color line” was drawn in mainstream professional baseball in December 1889. Drawing on historian Barbara J. Fields's argument that race is a social construction, this study asks: How did Sporting Life construct race during the first decade of its existence? The researcher examined a census of Sporting Life issues between March 1883 and December 1889 for references to race. Overall, 169 articles from 348 issues of the weekly journal were identified and analyzed. Prior scholars have argued that Sporting Life was a progressive mouthpiece, encouraging the inclusion of African Americans in the National League and American Association, or an indifferent reflection of popular societal portrayals. This study uncovers a finer degree of nuance in its coverage of race. As a cultural forum, Sporting Life both perpetuated and contested dominant racial ideologies in its coverage of the emergence of baseball's system of segregation.

Functional Neuroimaging Can Support Causal Claims about Brain Function

Cognitive neuroscientists habitually deny that functional neuroimaging can furnish causal information about the relationship between brain events and behavior. However, imaging studies do provide causal information about those relationships-although not causal certainty. Although popular portrayals of functional neuroimaging tend to attribute too much inferential power to the technique, we should restrain ourselves from ascribing it too little.

Chen Shui-bian: On Independence

AbstractChen Shui-bian achieved an international reputation for his promotion of Taiwan independence. Whilst that reputation may have been well earned, the analyses on which this conclusion is based are frequently flawed in two ways. First, by using an undifferentiated notion of independence, they tend to conflate sovereignty with less threatening expressions of Taiwanese identity and pro-democracy discourse. Second, by failing to take into account the impact of immediate strategic context, analysts ignore a fundamental element of democratic political communication. In our empirical analysis of more than 2,000 of Chen's speeches, we seek to avoid both flaws by unpacking the concept of independence and taking into account Chen's strategic relationship with his primary audiences. Our findings challenge popular portrayals of Chen, but more importantly they have strong implications for policy makers and students of political rhetoric with regard to current and future ROC presidents.

An empirical examination of AMBER Alert ‘successes’

The AMBER Alert system was designed to recover endangered missing children through the solicitation of citizen assistance via swift public announcements. Rigorous empirical support for AMBER Alert's effectiveness has been lacking, but since its inception program advocates and public safety officials have lauded the system's ability to “save lives”, often basing their optimism on AMBER Alert “success” stories. However, in this paper quantitative and qualitative analyses of 333 publicized and celebrated AMBER Alert “successes” suggest AMBER Alerts rarely result in the retrieval of abducted children from clearly “life-threatening” situations, and that most of the publicized successes involved relatively benign abductors and unthreatening circumstances. The routine conflation of such apparently mundane cases with rare dramatic successes by AMBER Alert advocates suggests popular portrayals of AMBER Alert are overly sanguine. The potentially negative effects of this and policy implications are discussed.

Days of their lives: a mixed‐methods, descriptive analysis of the men and women at work in the principal’s office

This study examines the work of US school principals from the perspective of their workday using a distributed perspective to frame the investigation. Using data on 38 school principals in one mid‐sized urban school district in the US, it describes school principals’ work practices, examining both the focus of that work and how it is accomplished. Cluster analysis is used to analyse data from an experience sampling method (ESM) log, identifying three patterns of practice: administration‐centred, solo practitioners, and people‐centred. To explicate these patterns, qualitative interview and observation data were combined with quantitative survey and log data to construct mini‐cases of three principals, each representing one of the three patterns of practice. The study concludes with a discussion of how this analysis both confirms and challenges popular portrayals of the school principal in the literature.

Meaningful work? Nonprofit marketization and work/ life imbalance in popular autobiographies of social entrepreneurship

As social entrepreneurship gains increasing acclaim and institutional support, there is a need for greater critical assessment of its practices and effects, including how it relates to current concerns about meaningful work. Our critical analysis of popular autobiographies of social entrepreneurs provides insight into how marketization forces are shaping the construction of meaningful work within the US nonprofit context. Our findings illustrate that although popular portrayals of social entrepreneurship offer a compelling vision of meaningful work centred on solving pressing social problems, they also celebrate a troubling account of work/life balance centred on self-sacrifice, underpaid and unpaid labour and the privileging of organizational commitment at the expense of health, family and other aspects of social reproduction. In focusing critical attention on popular autobiographies, our analysis contributes to ongoing efforts to understand how popular culture assists in reproducing problematic assumptions about work and professional life.

Trust and technology: the social foundations of aviation regulation

This paper looks at the dilemmas posed by 'expertise' in high-technology regulation by examining the US Federal Aviation Administration's (FAA) 'type-certification' process, through which they evaluate new designs of civil aircraft. It observes that the FAA delegate a large amount of this work to the manufacturers themselves, and discusses why they do this by invoking arguments from the sociology of science and technology. It suggests that - contrary to popular portrayal - regulators of high technologies face an inevitable epistemic barrier when making technological assessments, which forces them to delegate technical questions to people with more tacit knowledge, and hence to 'regulate' at a distance by evaluating 'trust' rather than 'technology'. It then unravels some of the implications of this and its relation to our theories of regulation and 'regulatory capture'.

The Night Fairy (review)

Reviewed by: The Night Fairy Kate Quealy-Gainer Schlitz, Laura Amy. The Night Fairy; illus. by Angela Barrett. Candlewick, 2010 [128p]. ISBN 978-0-7636-3674-6 $16.99 Reviewed from galleys R Gr. 3–5 When a bat mistakes Flory for a satisfying meal and destroys her wings, the young night fairy must learn to survive without the ability to fly. Taking shelter in the garden of an old “giantess,” as she terms the human, Flory carves a little niche for herself, stealing nuts and berries from birdfeeders and using her magic to fend off predators, but still longs to take to the sky, hoping that eventually one of the garden’s resident hummingbirds will offer her a ride. A quiet read with an episodic chapter-book structure, this tale is a perfect next step for young readers transitioning from fairy-tale picture books to more sophisticated fantasies. Schlitz, best known for her Newbery-winning nonfiction Good Masters! Sweet Ladies! (BCCB 9/07), creates pure magic in her depiction of Flory’s world, deftly blending the appealing sweetness of the more popular portrayals of fairies with the darkly subversive, but still subtle, tone of traditional folklore. The bats, squirrels, and spiders that populate the garden are far from any Disneyfied singing forest creatures, but neither are they soulless predators, and Flory’s interactions with them present an intriguing picture of the secret workings of nature. The book therefore brings both the gossamer lightness of fairy stories and the rich darkness of fantasy to its tale, and readers will revel in Flory’s mysterious and sometimes magical realm. Final illustrations not seen. Copyright © 2010 The Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois

Better Off Than You Might Think: Russia Is Not a Basket Case

[ 132 ] asia policy Better Off Than You Might Think: Russia Is Not a Basket Case Jeffrey Mankoff With a range of collaborators, Anders Åslund and Andrew Kuchins have written a very fair-minded and penetrating analysis of the Russian political economy. Published by the Peterson Institute for International Economics, The Russia Balance Sheet is a follow up to the very successful 2006 book China: The Balance Sheet.1 As its predecessor did for China, The Russia Balance Sheet seeks to identify the underlying strengths and weaknesses of the unique political-economic model that has emerged in Russia over the past decade-plus and then offers a strategy to U.S. policymakers now seeking to re-conceptualize Washington’s relationship with Moscow. The book’s timing is particularly fortunate, being published in the early spring of 2009 when Russia was suffering through the worst part of the global economic crisis. The book’s focus on Russia’s strengths is especially welcome, because popular portrayals of the country too often emphasize the negative: social decay, corruption, repressive politics, and an aggressive foreign policy. The Russia Balance Sheet makes the case that, with the exception of corruption, many of these stereotypes ought to be tempered by a longer perspective and a broader comparative lens. As Åslund and Kuchins emphasize, Russia in many ways is better off than most middle income countries, including its putative partners among the BRIC economies (Brazil, India, and China), all of whose citizens have a much lower median income level and less access to education than their Russian counterparts. Moreover, Russia lacks the desperate poverty of the Brazilian favelas (shanty towns) or the slums of Mumbai. Russia is also more economically open than it is often given credit for being (p. 77).2 At least until the onset of the current crisis, Russian economic policy was generally conservative, with the oil wealth sequestered in a sovereign wealth fund designed both to insure against a downturn and to prevent the influx of money from setting off inflation. 1 C. Fred Bergsten, Bates Gill, Nicholas R. Lardy, and Derek J. Mitchell, China: The Balance Sheet (New York: PublicAffairs, 2006). 2 Per capita foreign investment in Russia was seven times higher than in China as of 2007. jeffrey mankoff is Associate Director of International Security Studies (ISS) at Yale University and Adjunct Fellow for Russia Studies at the Council on Foreign Relations. He can be reached at . [ 133 ] book review roundtable • the russia balance sheet Despite these strengths, Russia has for the most part experienced a bad crisis, and this book’s analysis of the Russian economy’s unique structure helps us understand why. The problem has much to do with politics, particularly the way in which wide swaths of the economy have become a cash-cow for the governing elite. To some extent, the fusion of business and politics is part of the Soviet legacy, but Åslund and Kuchins make clear that it also rests on specific policy choices, particularly those of the past five or six years. The Russia Balance Sheet begins with an attempt to trace the historical evolution of Russia’s state capitalist system, emphasizing the uneven trajectory of economic reform in Russia since the mid-1980s when Mikhail Gorbachev launched perestroika. The failure of Gorbachev’s economic reforms set the stage for the struggles over economic policy that have been central to Russian politics since the end of the Soviet Union. Under Boris Yeltsin some sectors, notably oil, were effectively privatized, setting the stage for a decade or more of impressive growth. Yet Russia never broke completely with the Sovietera model of large industrial conglomerates subject to state management. Gazprom, Russia’s largest and most powerful corporation, is merely a partially privatized successor of the old Soviet Ministry of Oil and Gas. Likewise, three state-dominated companies—Sberbank, VTB, and Gazprombank—control half the Russian banking sector. Russia has gone through periods of further reform since the heyday of liberalization in the early 1990s. As Åslund and Kuchins point out, Putin himself started off as a serious reformer. Only with the assault on Mikhail Khodorkovsky and Yukos in 2003 did Russia begin retreating from the goal of...

Living our religions: Hindu and Muslim South Asian American women narrate their experiences

The population of the South Asian Diaspora in the US is over 2.5 million people. Yet in a post 9/11 climate of opinion, little is known about this group beyond images of Muslim and Hindu fundamentalists and terrorists. This is particularly true of women where simplistic assumptions about veils and subordination obscure the voices of the women themselves. Rarely are Hindu and Muslim American women--many of whom are social workers, physicians, lawyers, academics, students, homemakers--asked about their everyday lives and religious beliefs. . Living our Religions brings out these hidden stories from South Asian American women of Bangladeshi, Pakistani, Indian and Nepali origin. Their accounts show how diverse and culturally dynamic religious practices emerge within the intersection of histories and politics of specific locales. The authors describe the race, gender, and ethnic boundaries they encounter; they also document how they resist and challenge these boundaries. Living our Religions cuts through the myths and ethnocentrism of popular portrayals to reveal the vibrancy, courage and agency of an invisible minority.

The digital native – myth and reality

PurposeThe purpose of this paper is to develop and promote a realistic understanding of young people and digital technology with a view to supporting information professionals in playing useful and meaningful roles in supporting current generations of young people. In particular the paper aims to offer a critical perspective on popular and political understandings of young people and digital technologies – characterised by notions of “digital natives”, the “net generation” and other commonsense portrayals of expert young technology users. The paper seeks to consider the accuracy of such descriptions in reflecting young people's actual uses of digital technology and digital information.Design/methodology/approachThe paper provides a comprehensive review of the recent published literatures on young people and digital technology in information sciences, education studies and media/communication studies.FindingsThe findings show that young people's engagements with digital technologies are varied and often unspectacular – in stark contrast to popular portrayals of the digital native. As such, the paper highlights a misplaced technological and biological determinism that underpins current portrayals of children, young people and digital technology.Originality/valueThe paper challenges the popular assumption that current generations of children and young people are innate, talented users of digital technologies. Having presented a more realistic basis for approaching generational differences in technology use, the paper explores the functions and roles that information professionals can be expected to play in supporting young people in the digital age.

Giant Leaps and Forgotten Steps: NASA and the Performance of Gender

Popular portrayals of American spaceflight regularly propose that the history of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration epitomizes the masculinist organization of American post-WWII modernity. Films such as Philip Kaufman's The Right Stuff (and earlier book), or Ron Howard's Apollo 13 (see Llinares, this volume), seemingly correlate the success of NASA, and by extension America and/or humanity, around the fortunes of strong, stoical, active and resourceful men. Meanwhile, women, such as the astronauts’ wives, seemingly feature as rather passive, marginalized and abjected. Manly bodies are shown here capable of ‘risk taking’, ‘frontier exploration’, ‘technical decision making’, ‘competition’ and ‘attention to detail’, all qualities which Connell (1995) suggested typified ‘hegemonic’ masculinities and legitimated patriarchies.1 Popular examples of NASA's articulation of masculinist social power are complemented by various scholarly accounts explaining how NASA has historically subjugated women (Ackmann, 2004; Kevles, 2003; Moule and Shayler, 2003; Penley, 1997; Weitekamp, 2004). This chapter takes the underlying claim found within such studies – NASA articulated a gendered binary – as its starting point. Rather than foregrounding the stories of women in NASA as a revisionist counterpoint, as many of these studies have, I will go further and critically assess the dis/organization of underlying binary oppositions which often frames explanations of the relationship between NASA and gender.

"An Eloquent and Impassioned Plea": The Rhetoric of Ruiz de Burton's The Squatter and the Don

"An Eloquent and Impassioned Plea":The Rhetoric of Ruiz de Burton's The Squatter and the Don Elisa Warford (bio) Since Rosaura Sánchez and Beatrice Pita's publication of a new edition of María Amparo Ruiz de Burton's The Squatter and the Don in 1992, a steadily growing body of work on Ruiz de Burton and her novels has emerged. The critical corpus on her is still not large enough, though, to match her significance in California history and in the literary tradition of Latina writers in California. As the first narrative about the state's Mexican landowners published in English by a Mexican American woman and from the perspective of the conquered Mexican culture, The Squatter and the Don (1885) is remarkable for the ways it complicates nineteenth-century stereotypes of Latin Americans, particularly Latin American women, as several critics have successfully argued. But what is often overlooked is the novel's pervasive rhetorical appeal. The narrator of this "novel with a purpose," as more than one reviewer called it, is constantly aware of her readers and seeks to educate them about the plight of the Californios and to persuade them to take action against the injustices the Californios suffered at the hands of the US government, which promised them the full protection of the law due any citizen of the United States (Ruiz de Burton, Conflicts 568). While the novel did not attract the national audience Ruiz de Burton might have hoped for, contemporaneous reviews uniformly praise it for its stylistic control, "well drawn" characters, "sprightly, natural" dialogue, "entertaining style," and "dramatic power" (Ruiz de Burton, Conflicts 566, 566, 566, 569). The review from the Daily Examiner notes, "people with grievances are not usually popular, as frequently they are wearisome. But this failing cannot be laid to the charge of the author of 'Squatter and the Don.' … The author has managed to combine instances of all these sins of omission and commission in a very pleasant and readable tale" (Ruiz de Burton, Conflicts 565). A large part of Ruiz de Burton's success in creating a "pleasant" tale that also manages to persuade is due in large part to her skillful adaptations of literary forms her audience would have been familiar with. Like The Grapes of Wrath (1939), perhaps the best-known California social protest novel, The Squatter and the Don borrows from [End Page 5] several different genres that are well suited to social protest, including verbatim legislation, the jeremiad, sentimental romance, and naturalism. Such combinations illustrate perfectly Mikhail Bahktin's theory of heteroglossia, which allows for a dialogic interplay of different voices that have not previously been heard. The novel is not merely a lament for a past way of life; as most reviews emphasize, it succeeded in showing that the problems faced by the Californios affected all Californians. In presenting her case, Ruiz de Burton works against popular portrayals of Californios, and she does so brilliantly, dismantling stereotypes and prejudice. The title page of Squatter describes it as "a novel descriptive of contemporary occurrences in California." The book depicts the Alamar family's struggles against a group of "ruffianly" squatters who settle on their land, kill Don Mariano's cattle with impunity, and eventually force the family to retreat from its ranch to San Francisco. In the second half of the novel, the Alamars join forces with other San Diegans to advocate for a much-needed railroad terminus in their city. They find their hopes for the wealth a terminus could bring dashed by government corruption and prejudice. Ruiz de Burton's own life attests to the currency of the Alamars' struggles: while she was writing the novel, she, like the Alamars, was entangled in legal battles over the title of her Jamul, California, ranch. Mariano Vallejo and numerous old Californio families were also struggling to retain their estates and wealth, and many died considerably poorer than they once were. This issue was not a fait accompli. While critics today often classify The Squatter and the Don as historical romance, to do so tacitly acknowledges that the question was already moot at the time of the novel's publication and robs it...

What's So Funny about Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder?

During the past several decades, obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) has been widely represented in novels, memoirs, film, television, and other genres and media. What distinguishes representations of OCD from depictions of other mental disorders is the frequency with which OCD is treated with humor and levity. Drawing on genre theory, disability studies, and philosophies of humor, this essay explains why OCD symptomatology evokes laughter and resonates with contemporary popular culture. The essay focuses on the ways in which popular portrayals of OCD distort the actual experience of the disorder.

Roots of Resistance: A History of Land Tenure in New Mexico by Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz (review)

Although several of the essays are a bit plodding or cover too broad a period of time to provide sufficient depth, The African American Experience in Texas is an incredibly significant work and its historiographic influence will shape not only Texas and African American history, but the fields of American South and West as well. Jefferson College Scott Holzer Roots of Resistance: A History of Land Tenure in New Mexico. By Roxanne DunbarOrtiz . (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2007. Pp. 258. Map, notes, bibliography, index. ISBN 978-0-80613-833-6. $19.95, paper.) In the preface to this new edition, Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz discusses the roots of her analysis of land tenure in New Mexico. Stretching back to her first visit to New Mexico in 1958, Dunbar-Ortiz recalled how as a student at the University of California at Los Angeles in the 1960s she learned of the conflict over land rights in Tierra Amarilla. In the midst of the Chicano, black, Native American, and other movements for social justice and equity, here were people who had lived in New Mexico for generations fighting for something as elemental as land. The evangelical firebrand Reis López Tijerina led Hispano farmers, Chicano students , and their supporters against local police and the National Guard, but Dunbar-Ortiz noted that many Pueblo Indians, despite similar grievances, did not join them. She subsequently became interested in the ways in which the historical systems of land tenure developed by Indians, Hispanos, and Anglos factored into the events before her. This confluence of contemporary protest and historical curiosity led to the writing of Roots of Resistance. In this updated version, the University of Oklahoma Press has re-released an influential book on the history of New Mexico, southwestern Native peoples, and Chicana/o history. More than a quarter century after its first publication, it remains just as relevant to the contemporary dilemmas facing communities in New Mexico and the American West. A new final chapter brings the book up to date with recent events in New Mexican land and environmental politics, but it remains true to the book’s thesis: colonialism and capitalist commodification of resources serve as the foundation for the sociocultural and racial relations that developed in northern New Mexican land tenure. Grounded in a Marxist analysis of capitalist development, Dunbar-Ortiz has several goals for this socioeconomic interpretation of New Mexican history. First, she challenges popular portrayals of Indians and Hispanics as timeless people living in isolation from historical change. She argues that Indians and Hispanos actively shaped new land tenure systems imposed by outsiders, and in the process deflected the most extreme elements of capitalism. Second, she traces competing land tenure systems from pre-conquest eras through Spanish land grants and how those grants created racial and economic divisions among settlers and Pueblos, the emergence of self-sufficient village and communal resource usage, the transformation of land grants with the penetration of mercantile capitalists that reoriented local economies to the United States, the expropriation of 2009 Book Reviews 351 *jan 09 11/26/08 12:00 PM Page 351 resources by foreign capitalists and the new politico-legal regimes they brought at the end of the nineteenth century, and the transformation of Hispanic and indigenous landowners into wage earners in a highly stratified economy. Few books approach complicated issues with a similar balance of theoretical clarity and historical depth. Although some readers may wonder about recent concerns with racial identity and gender, Dunbar-Ortiz provides a sweeping analysis of the ways in which outsiders have sought to control land and water in northern New Mexico. To her credit, she attempts to highlight Native agency and resistance to expropriation, even as her methodological framework is a sociohistorical interpretation of systems and institutions. Her use of Marxist stages and a materialist view of historical development may seem strange to scholars immersed in poststructrualism and cultural studies, but she attempts to shine a bright light on the contentious struggle over land in northern New Mexico. For this, her book will remain crucial reading for anyone interested in southwestern , Native American, and Chicana/o history. University of Texas at El Paso Jeffrey P. Shepherd Lyndon...

Unknown Urbanity: Towards the Village in the City

AbstractThe popular portrayal of the Village in the City (ViC) is as a threatened anomaly. On TV and in photojournalism it is most often depicted as a single surviving, washed‐up rural community surrounded by a sea of urban high‐rises, where ex‐farmers use the vestiges of their land‐rights to cash in as landlords. Amsterdam‐based Japanese architect Yushi Uehara contradicts this view by describing how the ViC represents a significant form of ‘dynamic resistance created in an exceptional bottom‐up process’. Copyright © 2008 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Surveillance in the Digital Enclosure

Popular portrayals of ubiquitous computing downplay the surveillance implications of emerging forms of networked interactivity. This essay supplements such accounts by analyzing interactive spaces as digital enclosures which restrict access to the means of interaction to those who “freely” submit to the detailed forms of monitoring that take place within them. It supplements privacy-based critiques of surveillance with questions about the ownership and control of such data and the implications of this control for networked communication.

Establishing a Democratic Religion: Metaphysics and Democracy in the Debates Over the President's Commission on Higher Education

World War II stands as a defining moment for American higher education. During the crisis of international relations that existed by the late 1930s, American thinkers of various stripes felt compelled to mobilize the country's intellectual and educational resources in defense of democracy, thus creating “a great ideological revival of democracy that accompanied the war.” The war aims of the United States—as enunciated in the Atlantic Charter and popular portrayals of the “good war” in which the United States fought to free the world from the grips of evil dictatorships—gave tremendous legitimacy to these efforts, which built into a national discussion on the goals of higher education. Between 1943 and 1947, at least five major reports on general education or liberal education appeared, three of which explicitly treated the relation of such education to “democracy” or “free society.”

The Nez Perce leadership council

PurposeThis paper aims to show how industrial thinking has led to a myopic focus on individual leadership styles to the potential detriment of a broader understanding of leadership. Also, to present the Nez Perce leadership council as an exemplar of post‐industrial leadership. Finally, to demonstrate that a historical approach can be used effectively to elucidate such constructs.Design/methodology/approachA historical examination of the popular portrayal versus the actual functioning of the non‐treaty Nez Perce leadership council during the conflict of 1877.FindingsAlthough Chief Joseph has often been considered the supreme leader of the Nez Perce during the conflict period (industrial view), the group was actually led by a leadership council, which functioned in the manner described by Rost and Smith as post‐industrial leadership.Research limitations/implicationsAlthough the paper illuminates Rost and Smith's model, it does not attempt to assess the effectiveness of post‐industrial leadership, as the successes and failures of the Nez Perce during the conflict period could be attributed to other variables beyond the authors' scope. It is to be hoped, however, that future researchers will continue the debate concerning leadership and its peripheral elements.Practical implicationsIt is suggested that contemporary organizational leaders should be focused on leadership beyond style and might consider the post‐industrial model for mutually satisfying influence, particularly with the team‐based and flattened structures common to the modern firm.Originality/valueThe use of a historical example and method to exemplify the contemporary model of post‐industrial leadership. Further, to demonstrate how industrial thinking has encouraged many to focus on the periphery of leadership.

Shikusutizu no Hibi

Since the 1980s, aging issues have become a national concern in Japan, propelled by the rapid pace of mass longevity. The Japanese government has been diligent—albeit not without criticisms—in rolling out new plans and measures to address the growing needs of an aging society. For example, with measures ‘for the arrival of the full-scale aging society’, the public pension system has been revised in 1985, 1989, 1994, 1996, 2000 and 2001. To meet the demands of facilities and services to care for the old, the ‘Gold Plan’ was implemented in 1990, revised in 1994 and further enhanced in 2000. The long-term care insurance introduced since April 2000 represents another attempt to provide affordable elder care and foster independence among older persons. Along with new plans and measures at the macro level, over the two decades since the panic button was pressed, discourses on aging in Japan have also become more diverse. On the one hand, pessimistic views of aging as ‘social pollution’ or as an overwhelming burden to the whole of society persist. On the other hand, positive views of aging that see seniors as an asset, such as active consumers or volunteers, are increasingly challenging the dominant (pessimistic) discourse. Such new perspectives on aging in Japan receive favorable media attention. The droves of retiring Japanese men and women—who just 50 years ago were expected to live little beyond their 50s—are in fact turning to the mass media, magazines and popular books to help them establish a new cultural script and guidelines as they move into their 60s. The ‘sixties’ is a watershed between ‘the previous life’ and ‘the new life’. The newly arrived 60s of the baby boomer generation is now perceived as the harbinger of the new and exciting mature years. Popular portrayals of ‘the sixties’ have gradually created this time as a window of opportunity to experience life to its fullest. The 60s is increasingly dominated with happy images of freedom and activity. It is one's second chance to fulfill one's dreams in life. It symbolizes a new lease on life made possible after one finally breaks away from the suffocating role of a corporate warrior. But is this really so?