Aging and Loss

Far from being dry ethnography, this book is written in a poetic and emotive voice. Yet the pictures of aging in Japan are far from overly optimistic. Danely writes: “From a national welfare perspective, there are just too few working age adults (fifteen to sixty-four years old) to keep government expenditure on elder care (including pensions and health benefits) at current rates” (48). This problem is compounded by the shortage of qualified medical personnel and the high burnout rate in these professionals. To illustrate the challenges, Danely notes that the Japanese Ministry of Health, Labor and Welfare implemented a requirement for long-term care insurance mandated for those over forty. The benefits become available at sixty-five and are based on a classification of care needs. In 2008, a change was introduced which, because of the political maneuvering of the government, became nicknamed “hurry up and die insurance” (51).
Danely is careful to avoid generalization and essentialism. He is particularly sensitive to the claims that the Japanese approach to aging is spared of anxiety and fears because of its filial structure. He avers that relying on generalized cultural assumptions often not only overlooks problems but also undermines the complexity and multiplicity of approaches. Danely points to the often held falsity that in Japanese society the relatives invariably take care of their elders. The fact that older Japanese retain relational ties (en) with many living people but are often supplemented by the relationships with the deceased, spirits (hotoke), points to a larger phenomenon of coping. Danely reminds the reader that hotoke represents a substantial part of a process of memorialization. He maintains that most of the older adults find solace and comfort in practicing regular memorial rituals for the spirits of the deceased. These rituals help to counter the folk narratives of abandonment – obasuteyama – the stories about the emotional pain of a son who abandons his elderly mother unable to care for her.
The issue of transience is central to Japanese cultural understanding of life’s processes. Transience is combined with fatalism as the recognition that certain events can never be changed and death is part of life. However, the acceptance of the inevitability of transience is more than a fatalistic attitude. It is also a stimulus for passing along traditions and values. Danely writes: “One way to understand what aging subjectivity means aesthetically is to look at other ways Japanese people appreciate old objects or objects that appear old” (21). To illustrate, he discusses an elderly man who makes traditional Noh theater masks made to look old. These masks aim to create “an ambiance and intimacy that recalled a sense of something that lasts” to underscore the fact that “the object was kept because it was cared for” (21).
Accepting transience does not translate into a lack of attachment and easily giving up physical things. The Japanese concept of ma – empty – helps to break the notion of attachment. Danely writes that ma marks “the beauty of incompleteness, ambiguity, and interdependence” (23). To strengthen his point, Danely invokes Tetsuro Watsuji’s use of the term ningen (person) which is comprised of the two characters: nin (human) and gen (space or in-between). For Watsuji, being human means being simultaneously an individual and a social being. This ‘in-betweenness’ provides space for learning and appreciating “one’s connection to others, to nature, and to invisible world of spirits” (24). The invisible world of spirits remains consistently important throughout the book as a cultural symbol. The Buddhist concept of interdependence contests dependence through its appreciation of this world of spirits.
Danely points out that Japan is moving from a low fertility aging society (shōshikōrei) to a mass death society (tashishakai) (29). In his discussion of intergenerational disharmony, Danely addresses a misleadingly simple process of an elderly woman moving from her own house to the house of her daughter. For this woman, this process becomes synonymous with the disposal not only of the inanimate, supposedly no longer needed objects, but also of the valuable parts of the self. The blurring of meaning of what should be kept is presented as “simply throw them away” (40) where ‘them’ assumes an ambiguous meaning.
In his discussion of bā – welfare centers – Danely draws the contrast with nursing homes disparagingly called obasuteyama – place of abandonment – and welfare centers. Danely discusses a welfare center where a strict differentiation is drawn between the past and present concerns and any past reminiscences are discouraged and is structured as the “way of the samurai” to prevent any emotional attachments. The welfare centers primarily serve the function of postponing (or preventing) cognitive decline or senility – boke. To address the matters of the heart – the care of kokoro – requires, however, more than focus on cognitive games but practices that honor the hotoke and ancestors.
Danely points out that the western definition of what constitutes ‘religion’ breaks down in application to the Japanese culture. He notes that adherence to tradition is generally not based on any religious (shukyō) convictions. He avers that many Japanese people consider themselves mushukyō (un-religious) and distinguish between un-religious and atheists. It is only atheists who purposefully abstain from religious practices, whereas un-religious do not abide by “a universalistic and absolute faith that requires personal experience of the supernatural” (52). Observing Shinto and Buddhist precepts do not contradict with their perceptions of themselves as un-religious and the boundary between a mysterious or supernatural and rational and natural is permeable and contested. The discussions of the ancestors, Buddhas, and deities are never dressed in a religious language but rather in the language of tradition (dentō).
Danely devotes significant attention to the fact that for Japanese people tradition “constituted a moral community around sacred things, shared rituals, and symbols” (53). Tradition represents cultural practices that transcend individual lives and gives them meaning. To illustrate, Danely discusses butsudan (home altar) that links Japanese tradition to the concept of the aging self. Danely writes: “Japanese ancestor memorialization, as practiced and embodied in offerings and words, is part of the work of self in mourning, recruiting, and reintegrating memories, impressions, and feelings of oneself and others, into a narrative of meaningful change” (56).
He contrasts the less formal death ceremonies (shotsukimeinichi) performed at home in front of the butsudan with Buddhist memorial ceremonies (hōyō) conducted at temples and graves. Despite their informality, the home ceremonies represent an equally significant way to honor the hotoke, whose faces (photos) look at those involved in the ritual during its performance and in effect incorporate the dead into the immediate lives of the living (59-61).
Danely addresses what he calls “landscapes of mourning,” and invokes the Buddhist Kumano Mandala and maintains that this mandala reflects upon the seasons of life and death whereas death and birth are “only open gates through which spirits passed between realms.” The picture of an old woman that is included in this mandala does not communicate decline but “completion, perfection” (65). But how does this perfection fit into the 1984 film called Ballad of Narayama in which an elderly woman demands the abandonment despite her vitality? Danely explains that the Narayama Mountain serves as “a place of both redemption and reunion for the old and for the spirits of the departed” (69). The idea of this reunion is a significant theme to which Danely returns again and again in this work and the theme of abandonment is more complex and multilayered than the term itself implies.
In his discussion of what he calls the “landscape of mourning,” Danely turns his attention to cemeteries, which contrary to most western cities are located close by residences, shops, and schools and represent busy, crowded places where during the holidays families gather to wash the grave stones and bring bags of offerings, including flowers, packaged food and drinks. Cemeteries are, however, places of tranquility and the visitors come there in the morning, most of them older people. These visits, Danely claims, is a way to experience a loss. He connects these visits to the concept of abandonment but interprets it as a place where one no longer feels like “a burden, and no longer bound to the home” and experiences “an alluring sense of freedom” and anticipation of “reunion with loved ones” (74).
How to understand this expectation of reunion? Danely maintains that similar to the difficulty of defining the term “religious”, the term “spirit” defies easy categorization. The spirits of the departed are considered hotoke until the thirty-third death anniversary after which they are considered ancestors. However, Japanese people make very little ontological and epistemological distinction among the hotoke, the Buddhas, bodhisattvas, or the Shinto kami. Not interested in any cognitive labeling, Japanese people have difficulty in providing an explanation of the purpose of the monthly memorial services. This testifies to flexibility and permeability of tradition that does not find the need to define itself in terms of adherence to a clearly specified dogma. The cognitive definitions are unnecessary for the matters of kokoro.
To illustrate what Danely calls the “unconscious tradition”, he recounts a conversation with a priest in which the priest admitted Japanese religious syncretism but stated that funerals are “purely Japanese” (79, 80). Danely explains that abandoning ancestor memorial practices would mean to “unsettle the foundation of what it means to mourn, and indeed to be Japanese” (80).
In his discussion dedicated to the subjective perceptions of time, Danely recounts a study in which the participants were asked to create a visual representation of the life course. These visual representations produced what was later interpreted as “a Japanese orientation”. This orientation included two seemingly contradictory patterns: one linear and another cyclical both representing life’s trajectory. The linear progression directed forward was supplemented by a cyclical turn back to the future: “The hotoke move further away from ‘this world’ and closer to ancestor status, as they become reborn as future children within the household” (91). According to the views of this study’s participants, these two seemingly contradictory patterns were in perfect harmony. However, the linear progression is secondary to “the more cyclical temporal framework that implies reciprocity (the successors as dependent on elders), wisdom, and spiritual ascendance” (91).
As it becomes rather apparent, particularly important for one’s understanding of loss is the expectation of ancestors’ dependence on elders. Japanese ancestor worship addresses the most prominent fear that Japanese people experience: the fear of abandonment. Danely writes that Japanese people fear abandonment – “being left behind” – much more acutely than they fear frailty, dependence and death itself. The abandoned graves tell the stories of abandonment. They become visibly marked by the placards in which caregivers are asked to contact the temple to prevent the grave from being moved into the common memorial site for muenbotoke – feared, un-worshiped dead (106).
To address what Danely calls “aesthetics of failed subjectivity”, he turns his attention to the issue of neglect, abuse, and violence often hidden from public view. He avers that obasuteyama can be instructive to understanding these cases. To illustrate, he discusses Tatsumi Yoshihiro’s obasuteyama Abandon the Old in Tokyo (1970) and parallels it with discussing the real life cases of homicides often caused by caregivers’ stress from attending to their elderly mothers (often with dementia). He mentions the cases of unaccounted death stating that in 2010, there were at least 234,354 of Japan’s oldest citizens who were nowhere to be found. Danely is not interested in providing simple explanations related to the causes of abuse and neglect by attributing these to the spread of neoliberalism and global capitalism with their tendency to place the expectations of care on oneself. Instead, he argues that this explanation is merely partial and overlooks a much longer history of care in Japan, including the ie system (the corporate family system) that seems to be weakened if not undermined. He notes that the ie system in the recent years became intermingled with consumerism of the concept of uchi – “inside”. He suggests that uchi blurs the line between one’s group of intimate fellows and a consumer orientation focused on the hired help.
He concludes this work by returning his focus to economies of care and underscores how care and abandonment become “reimagined and reconstituted in aesthetic encounter with ‘the other world’” (161). He reiterates the significance and meaningfulness of memorialization which, similar to obasuteyama “hinges in the aesthetic suspense between abandonment and hope” (190). In Danely’s view, in Japanese culture rather than ethics, “the aesthetic pervades every aspect of being and every human interaction, from speech to dress, from religion to family life, from relationships with the natural world to those with technology” (190). In effect, aesthetic of care collapses the category of ethics of care into one and the same. 

Ilana Maymind, Ohio State University, maymind.3@osu.edu

Citation:
Maymind, I. 2016. Review of Danely, J. 2014. Aging and Loss. Mourning and Maturity in Contemporary Japan, posted on New Asia Books on 29 January 2016, http://newbooks.asia/review/aging-and-loss