Throughout my fieldwork in rural Japan over the past 10 years, people have repeatedly expressed the comment that everywhere you look, all you see is old faces. While it may be an overstatement, it does convey a common image about Japan that is well-supported by demographic data-the country is increasingly not simply an aging but an aged society. Indeed, today approximately 20% of the Japanese population is over the age of 65, and this is expected to grow to more than 35% of the population by 2050. 1 The process of change from a fairly young society to an aged one has been rapid. In 1970, for example, the dependency ratio stood at 10.3; by 1990 this had increased to 17.3 and by 2004 the estimated dependency ratio was 29.2. 2 During the same period, the aging index of Japanese society increased from 29.4 to 140.3. These demographic trends in Japan are largely the result of a combination of decreased fertility and increased longevity; as of 2004, the total fertility rate for Japan was estimated by the government to be 1.29 children per woman over the life course and life expectancy at birth was 78.64 years for men and 85.59 for women. 3 While Japan has been at the forefront of societal aging in Asia, other countries are showing similar patterns. South Korea has experienced a dramatic drop in the total fertility rate (TFR) in recent years, bringing it down to among the lowest in the world, estimated at 1.27 in 2006. China has also experienced a drop below a TFR of 2.0 in recent years, largely as a result of the one-child policy. These trends will eventually lead to significant growth in elder populations in these societies. Perhaps due to Japan's lead in these demographic changes, a great deal of research has been conducted on aging in Japan over the past 30 years. One of the earliest books on aging in Asia, Erdman Palmore's The Honorable Elders (1975), generated considerable interest among Western scholars concerned with aging. Gerontologists largely embraced Palmore's work, citing it widely and assuming that it accurately represented, as seen in the title of the book, an Eden-like society in which older people were revered and respected. Anthropologists and sociologists conducting in-depth ethnographic research have found that Palmore's understanding of Japanese culture and the role of the elderly in that culture was seriously flawed. Even a revised version of the book, published in 1985, continued to present several stereotypes of the role of elders in Japanese society (Palmore & Maeda, 1985). Scholars such as Akiko Hashimoto in sociology (1996), Brenda Jenike (2003), Yasuhito Kinoshita and Christie Kiefer (1993), Leng Leng Thang (2001), and myself (Traphagan, 2000, 2004) in anthropology have ethnographically described the experience and expression of aging in various parts of Japan over the past 15 years. What we have found is that growing old in Japan is not necessarily a smooth process toward the status of honored elder but involves a complex interaction of cultural values that allow dependence in old age but also stigmatize people who are overdependent (Traphagan, 2000). This int eraction of values may result in seeing the elderly as burdensome rather than honored, and can involve intense intergenerational conflict (Hashimoto, 1996). During the same period, there has been an explosion of journal articles in English by Japanese scholars such as Wataru Koyano, Daesaku Maeda, and Ryutaro Takahashi, many of whom are connected to the Tokyo Metropolitan Institute of Gerontology. These scholars work predominantly within the framework of quantitative social science and medical research, but also to some extent involve themselves in qualitative work. These studies also represent a remarkably complex picture of growing old in Japan and point out many of the social policy issues that have arisen as Japanese society has aged. While researchers have focused a great deal of attention on aging in Japan, the remainder of Asia has not been as well studied. …