22-24 September 1994
Vienna, Austria

OLD AGE AND AGEING IN JAPAN AND OTHER ASIAN COUNTRIES: SPITITUAL CONDITIONS
AND SOCIAL REALITY PAST AND PRESENT

Designed to shed light on both the culturally rooted images of old age and
the actual living conditions of the elderly in Asia past and present, the
conference gathered scholars currently engaged in research on these and
related topics and involved them in a discussion along comparative lines
which, it is hoped, in the long run will be fruitful for
socio-gerontological studies as a whole.

By Susanne Formanek

With the 'greying' of the population in Western industrialized countries,
popular and academic interest have increasingly been drawn to the cultural
construction of old age in past centuries and in other regions of the
world. Among these, Asia and especially Japan, have received a fairly large
amount of consideration because of their alleged traditional respect for
the elderly or the concept of filial piety. At this conference, the section
for Japanese Studies of the Research Institute for the Cultural and
Intellectual History of Asia of the Austrian Academy of Sciences, which for
several years has been engaged in the study of the history of old age in
Japan, attempted to give an, albeit incomplete, overview of the research
done in this field, combining sociological and humanistic approaches.
The 19 papers by participants from Austria (3), Germany (2), the
Netherlands (1), the USA (11) and Japan (3) geographically covered India (2
papers), Tibet (1), China (3), Korea (1) and Japan (12). They fell broadly
into three categories. One group of papers dealt  with the religiously and
culturally rooted views of old age. Thus religiously inspired disengagement
in old age in Hinduism or the early Buddhist view of the painful
inescapability of decrepitude, which would prompt people to try to escape
the cycle of rebirths, were discussed, as well as the much more positive
image of old age in Chinese Taoism or in the Japanese syncretistic view of
ageing as an awe-inspiring maturization process. These positive views in
turn were challenged by papers dealing with some more specific areas of
Japanese culture, revealing conspicuous demonization of elderly women in
Japan's past and highly negative stereotypes of old age harboured by the
present-day Japanese.
Another group of papers explored the impact of societal change on the
status of the elderly. The traditional Confucian concept of filial piety
was analyzed with regard to its outcome in the process of modernization in
different countries of the region, as well as the unforeseen impacts of the
communist revolution and the recent tend towards market- oriented socialism
on the elderly in China. With Tibet as an example, it was argued that in
view of the tremendous changes in intergenerational relations in the course
of modernization, policies for the aged should no longer be exclusively
directed towards their families, but should foster their financial
independence.
Among a third group of papers focusing on the present situation of the
elderly, mostly in Japan, many took a closer look at the circumstances of
home-based care for the elderly, emphasizing and elucidating the role of
women in caring for the elderly.
On the whole, the cross-cultural and interdisciplinary approach of the
conference was felt to be both gratifying and stimulating and the
considerable regional and historical variation as regards the valuation of
old age and the elderly, despite close cultural ties in this part of the
world, was acknowledged to be useful in comprising any unidimensional
explanations.
As with former conferences organized by the Institute for the Cultural and
Intellectual History of Asia, it is planned to publish the conference
papers in a volume of the proceedings.