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The Age of Silver: Aging in Modern Japan
| Article
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14526 |
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Section : |
CULTURE
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| Issue
Date : |
3 / 1988 |
4,364 Words |
| Author
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David W. Plath
David W. Plath is professor of anthropology at the University
of Illinois at Champaign-Urbana. |
Twenty years ago new signs were posted over a row of seats in Japan's subway cars, buses, and commuter trains. Printed in the square syllabary used for foreign words, the signs read shirubaa shiito. The words had come from English but the idiom was made in Japan--silver seat. Lines in smaller print encouraged passengers to yield these seats to the elderly and disabled. Soon found everywhere in the mass transit system, the little signs were evidence of an enlarging worry: how to make a new place for old age. The Japanese way of living was being transformed not only by high technology and economic growth, but also by an unusually high rate--some calculations put it tops in the world--of longevity.
Perhaps Japan, Incorporated, is able to speak with one voice when making policy for the production of microchips, but on the matter of making a new place for old people even the contours of a national consensus are in dispute. Labor leaders and cultural critics, doctors, businessmen, and bureaucrats all are having their say in a society-wide dialogue that by 1980 had reached stunning proportions. If it were possible to count, my guess is that in any one month in the 1980s, Japanese have written more articles and books on aging, and held more conferences and seminars on the subject, than they did over the preceding thousand years.
Japan's media pundits are quick to offer cockamamie "solutions" to the "problem" of aging and to strike postures of cultural chauvinism. But the overall tenor of the dialogue is reflective, sober, and just a little anxious. People are hoping that Confucian principles of seniority will remain viable in some form, but worry that clumsy policymaking will expose Japan to the "advanced nation diseases" of labor unrest, rampant crime, teenage pregnancy, and family dissolution.
Shirubaa (silver) has come into wide use as a euphemism for old. Senior Japanese now can obtain a shirubaa kaado (card) entitling them to discount purchases. Department stores offer a shirubaa koonaa (corner) stocked with adult diapers and geriatric health aids. Marketing experts speak of the bright prospects for the shirubaa indasutorii (industries) that target their products toward the over-sixty age sector. The elderly or their caretakers can dial shirubaa 110, a hotline for advice on medical and social service programs for them. And in the autumn of 1986, the Ministry of International Trade and Industry announced shirubaa koronbia (Columbia), its policy for encouraging adventure-seeking retirees to relocate overseas.
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