Section 5 | Anthropology and Sociology | Session 6B, Session
chair: Bruce White (Doshisha University, Kyoto)
Anemone Platz, University of Aarhus
The increasing need of senior friendly apartments, old people’s homes, old people’s care centres and the like has not come as a surprise to Japan . It is the consequence of a demographic development that experts of many different areas have foreseen long ago. Japan ’s citizens grow rapidly old and even if we presume willingness among the younger generations to take care of them, there will not be enough children to take care of the growing number of elderly in the family.
In spite of this knowledge, it is first in the 1990es that a real boom in the development of communal and private senior and care initiatives began. This boom continues, and it has strengthened and diversified itself. But this finds place without including the potential users of the housing in the process. This project thus aims at filling part of this gap. What are the needs and wishes of elderly Japanese concerning their housing and its surroundings? How strong is the need of using (traditional) Japanese elements in the dwelling? Is the knowledge underlying the traditional flexibility of Japanese rooms and furniture used, when it comes to the shaping of senior citizen’s institutions in Japan ? These are some of the questions posed in this project. Interviewees are people between 50-70 years old, i.e. representatives of the coming users of institutions and housing for the elderly. In the centre of our attention are those who see themselves living as long as possible in their own home, either in an individual household or in an individual apartment as part of a care institution. More concretely the questions revolve around size, interior and furniture, colours, flexibility and incidence of light, everyday life within one’s own four walls, social contacts in the living area and images of comfortableness (kokochi yosa).
Peter Ackermann (University of Erlangen)
By focusing on how, where and when adequate strategies for both verbal and nonverbal self-presentation are learnt, it is possible to get an idea of many of the major factors shaping the younger generation’s patterns of communication. To understand these patterns it is important not merely to consider what can be seen and measured at one point in time, but also to find out what has accumulated through time in a young person's memory that will serve as matrix, or point of reference, when successive generations shape their own, new patterns of self-presentation. In my paper I wish to present my findings concerning the acquisition within one's own family of concepts for shaping strategies to relate a) to concrete persons, especially one’s partner and/or spouse, b) to transcendent “persons” such as deceased ancestors, a god, or a protecting divinity. As this is one step in a larger project which will include a considerable amount of field work I will limit my observations here largely to the normative level and seek to understand how selected Japanese materials discuss, or also impose, ideas about in-family communication. In a sense, these materials can be understood as reinforcing values that should be – but not necessarily are - “stored” in a person’s memory. Using these observations as a starting point, it will then be necessary to relate this normative level to a person’s actual narratives about recollections, observations and concepts for passing on norms to the following generation.
Todd J.M. Holden (Tohoku University)
Research on the Internet in Japan has been conducted for nearly a decade now, yet it has received relative neglect in the English-speaking world. Exceptions exist, notably Gottlieb and McLelland's collection of fourteen studies (2003), as well as an online journal, Japan Media Review, published by the University of Southern California. Aside from language barriers, one reason for neglect may stem from the perception that Japan is an Internet absentee. Despite boasting the second largest economy in the world, and the world's ninth largest population, Japan only ranks fourteenth in Internet penetration rates. Nonetheless with Internet access for households at 34% (and 45% for businesses), Japan does enjoy the third highest web access rate in Asia. And with cell phone ownership now exceeding 70%, web surfing and Internet communication have become everyday practices among Japanese. What do Japanese people do on the web? Past studies have identified email communication (McVeigh 2003), social web-spinning (Holden and Tsuruki 2003), service functions (Mackie 2003; Onosaka 2003), propaganda/information (Kienle and Staemmler 2003), and social participation among the excluded (Li, Shibata and Ikeda (1998). Little studied, to date, has been how web pages are used as intentional expressions of self (but see Yamashita 1997, 2002; Kawaura et al, 1998). In short, web pages serve as tools of identity construction; the web, itself, stands as an exhibit hall of contemporary Japanese identity. In this paper I lead a tour through Japan's webbed museum, providing a systematic content analysis of web pages, weblogs, web diaries ("nikki") and photologs.