Unmasking Japan Myths and Realities About the Emotions of the Japanese [Hardcover]

The indisputable fact of Japan's rapidly aging population has been known for some time. But beyond statistics and implications for the future, we do not know much about the actual aging process. Senior citizens and their varied experiences have, for the most part, been obscured by stereotypes. This fascinating new collection of research on the elderly works to put a human face on aging by considering multiple dimensions of the aging experience in Japan.

Faces of Agingforegrounds a spectrum of elder-centered issuessocial activity, caregiving, generational bias, suicide, sexuality, and communication with medical professionals, to name a fewfrom the perspective of those who are living them. The volume's diverse contributors represent the fields of sociology, anthropology, medicine, nursing, gerontology, psychology, film studies, gender studies, communication, and linguistics, offering a diverse selection of qualitative studies of aging to researchers across the social sciences.

The last twenty years have seen a growth of fascination with the Japanese, and the emergence of Japan as a world economic power has stimulated many works that have attempted to understand Japanese culture. The focus of this book is not on Japanese culture or society per se: rather, it is on how Japanese culture and society structure, shape, and mold the emotions of the Japanese people. All cultures shape and mold emotions, but the degree to which Japanese culture shapes emotion has led to several misunderstandings about the emotional life of the Japanese, which this book attempts to correct. An outstanding addition to the literature on an increasingly visible and growing segment of the Japanese population that enriches our understanding of the aging process as it is lived by real people, rather than as it is conceptualized by policy makers. Janet S. Shibamoto-Smith, Professor of Anthropology, University of California, Davis