Bob,
I’ve finally completed a careful reading of the Doraemon piece you sent several months ago—
again, my apologies for not being able to do so on a more timely way. And speaking of timely,
congratulations on your retirement! I’d love to hear a bit about your plans, as I am thinking
about it a couple of years from now, but am having trouble picturing life without work. Maybe
that should be my next research project?
Retirement seems to me mostly about getting away from the daily schedule of teaching. I will
still have the grad seminar next fall since we haven’t even gotten permission yet to fill my slot!
If we do in the next few days, we won’t hire until late next winter. My colleagues gave me
emeritus status, which will let me have a (shared) office as long as I want, and we keep our
library and internet access and fitness center (and free parking!!) anyway.
Maybe your situation is something like ours, that the major emphasis by far is on teaching, but
we do need to show a regular research program and publish in peer-reviewed journals. You have
done so much good work, but I never thought JC was a research school. So congratulations on
your Distinguished Faculty Award, you deserve it so much, and you have been such a teacher to
me over the years. Thanks. One thing has impressed me from research on aging, that people
who keep their minds and bodies going, often can keep going and remain creative for very long.
I’m sure we all have our favorites, but my at the moment is Patrick O’Brian, who wrote his 20
Aubrey/Maturin novels between 60 and 90.
So over the years I have built up a list of things I wanted to write and never got to. Now I’ll
have a chance to see which ones are worth pursuing. Maybe I sent you a paper on gender
relations in Japan as well as the robot paper, and that needs more attention too. I’m not clear at
this point whether I want to do more field research in Japan, but who knows as long as Betsy and
I are both healthy.
I started violin lessons a few years ago and that will be a big part of what I want to do instead
of teach. There is a community orchestra here that takes people without audition and I will sit in
with them starting this summer. And we garden when the weather’s nice, and travel for
birdwatching whenever we get the chance. Friday we are going to Alaska for the first time, for a
couple of weeks to catch the breeding season there.
I’m very interested in what you are doing here, and I think the question is not only fascinating,
but important (as WE get older, especially!). I’m not familiar with Doraemon except his
existence as pop culture icon, and reading things along the lines of the pieces like Schilling’s
that you are arguing with. That argument, that seeing D through the same rose-colored glasses as
the manga/TV/film presents him as being superficial and faulty, makes sense to me. I do,
though, disagree with some of your specifics. I will get to the question that I think was the
reason you sent this to me, that of amae in eldercare, in a bit.
One of the problems I have with the paper I would say in response to any structural analysis, that
it is perhaps too asynchronous. I wondered if there really has been no change over time in the
way D is produced and in the way he is understood by the audience. How a popular art piece is
understood by the audience is the $1M question. But as for the cartoon itself, the 2014 summer
movie was a blend of the first 7 years of the manga cartoons!! I don’t think this is exactly
cannibalization, but apart from a growing focus on environmental issues, I cannot find any
significant changes over time. All of the characters and some of the gadgets appear all the way
through. This makes me think, frankly, how very conservative Japanese culture is, and this
seems to have a deep bearing on gender relations there as well. I do know there has been
significant change in elder care, which might be considered when raising your question about
amae in terms of daughters-in-law. And although I don’t know as much as I should, I do know
that there are changes in Japanese families and gender expectations that I suspect affects the
expectations of and behaviors by Japanese mothers in terms of amayakasu. Even aside from the
question of change, I think there has much more of a mix in Japanese maternal behavior than
amayakasu, or students wouldn’t pass entrance exams.
Certainly the kyoiku mama is an interesting figure, and the Mother in Doraemon often gets after
him to study harder and do better. She is much less indulging to Nobita than Doraemon. But she
only appears in some, by no means all, of the episodes, and she is not a major character, barely
two dimensional. Do you think the stuff from Kondo is sufficient, that only later in life do
people come to realize the effects Mother has had on their characters thru her sacrifices? I am
trying to draw the distinction between Mother and Teacher pretty firmly.
In particular, I agree that the public-private dichotomy remains strong, but I do think that the
skills to deal with the public realm and the ability to navigate the divide are learned at home,
with the emphasis in schools on public, certainly. But I think that where kids might observe their
father looking for indulgence/care from their mother, kids also see their father going to work,
taking them to the zoo, etc. where the father’s behavior would be very different. Also, it seems
to me that mothers are expected to teach some of this explicitly; don’t they get blamed when kids
don’t adjust to the public sphere of the school setting? I’m thinking there may be some
discussion of this in Anne Alison’s piece on obento and motherhood. If I’m remembering
correctly, she talks about the bento as representing the mother’s indulgence-in-a-package that
accompanies the child to the public setting, but also that the mother does not decide the structure
of the bento, and that the inability of kids to eat what is prepared in what is seen as an
appropriate amount of time will be blamed on the mother. Thus a “good” mother would need to
balance indulgence with training of a young child for the “real world.” I’m not convinced of
your argument that Japanese mothers don’t shape character, except in the sense that Western
psychiatrists and philosophers would narrowly define the term. My perception is that they shape
character, just a different type. I’m sure this is correct, and also that mothers get blamed for
everything. That is what makes dealing with the symbol Mother as portrayed in a cartoon as a
blue robot cat on the one hand, and the reality of mothering in Japan so difficult. It seems to me
that the cartoon pretty much has to focus the blame on things going wrong on the way the
technology fits into social life, not on the technology itself or the social life itself. But it is clear
that Doraemon is never blamed for any of this in the cartoon, he is just too soft-hearted to resist
Nobita’s importunity. This is the core of the cartoon, after all, that the technology does not make
the world better, and that Doraemon does not make Nobita better, which is to say, help him
mature into the person his distant descendant wants Nobita to become. Social critics do hit
woman as mothers and pre-mothers hard, but the cartoon does not hit Doraemon hard, and
people have been deeply involved in Doraemon for over a generation. And as I’ve just written
above, I also think that the groundwork for character even of the independent variety is laid at
home. So you could be right about this, certainly. Have you seen any representations of this in
popular culture? Peak’s characterization of the inside/outside, Mother/Sensei, home life/group
life is so cogent, I hate to drag reality into a discussion of the symbol Mother as against the
reality of lived life, and the parts of lived life our symbols hide from us.
Let me turn to the topic of elder care, about which I feel slightly more competent to discuss. I
think that caregiving has changed in a number of important ways since Lock’s book (although I
like the book a lot). In particular, spousal care is more common than intergenerational care, and
my sense regarding amae is that it can go either way. The more common is probably a
continuation of established gender roles, which for elderly people is probably shaped by the
Japanese mother role you describe, although older cohorts and younger ones I think would be
somewhat different. But I’ve also seen a couple of situations in which husband’s take on
caregiving activities with a sense of okaeshi or as a way of applying existing competencies to a
problem (“I learned how to cook in the army” for example). There has also been an increase in
the proportion of caregivers who are daughters and sons (vs. DILs). Who provides the care, and
how (eg. utilization of KH services) seem to be more negotiable than in the past, and may change
over time in the care of a single individual. I also continue to think that Japanese elderly women
do not want to be a burden (although I’m not sure that is true of men my sense too is that aged
men are willing to be a burden on their wives, tho I don’t have an idea about their feelings
toward their D or DIL specifically. I think this is what Danely’s priest catches. What remains
from all the pre-KH days is the demographic projections, that many many more women than men
survive to great age, and that many of these women are increasingly physically and mentally
unable to care for themselves at all adequately. How will social robots as well as strong robots,
and the future possible combination, fit into their lives?). This was frequently voiced by people I
interviewed as having been a caregiver herself or watching someone else, but I suspect it also has
to do with the general cultural notion, reinforced by the media, of how burdensome caregiving is.
I remember that in the early 1990s my gerontologist colleague Penny Harris was pointing me to
the gerontological literature that in the US was looking at satisfactions that came out of
caregiving despite the hard physical and emotional work. When we asked caregivers in Japan,
they looked at us like we were from Mars when we tried to broach the topic in open-ended
interviews. We got those looks, or in a few cases got responses like, “There cannot be any
satisfaction in this job, because she’s not going to get better.” But subsequently, I did have
interviews in which caregivers talked about personal growth or satisfaction with having tried
their best. This is way beside the point, and no doubt my judgment of Japan is way behind the
times, but we might think of this comparison of NA vs J as a result of family structure and
motivation. We have chosen our partners, who have made us fuller, better, human beings. So
we can get satisfaction from caring for someone whom we love more than anyone else; this is all
our choice, and what could be more important than choice for us? Japanese marriage is a
commitment to an existing family or the beginning of what will be a continuing family. The
commitment is to getting the next generation into the world and going, for the good of the
family. But what is the point of a commitment to the past generation, a waste of resources that
could be better spent on the future, which we all agree is our obligation to make as prosperous
and successful for our family as we can. I think of J families as a sort of relay race. The
approaching runner passes the baton to the next runner, who take off as fast as possible. What
happens to the previous runner who has collapsed on the track from having given her all, does
not matter until she can be brought back into life thru the family mortuary cult. Is this all gone
now?
Also on the theme of updating data, netakiri has become officially (if not in the heads of the
older people) taboo. All of the formal services and training programs for home caregivers really
stress the need for independence—which you do discuss. Those who don’t comply aren’t doing
what they can to avoid being a burden, not only on their caregivers, but on the national budget. I
am glad to hear this. The people I talked to about the anti-netakiri movement were adamant in
its negative effects, and openly blamed D and DIL for being selfish, putting their own concerns
about those of the seniors they cared for, with the same level of indignation my wife talks about
young mothers here who don’t nurse or feed their child but just “prop a bottle.” Which gets us to
Turkle’s nice distinction of “care for” vs “care about.” It is tough to care for someone who is
troublesome to you without caring about them, and so we have to search the culture for reasons
for caring about as well as caring for.
To get to the more specific question of whether amae characterizes elder-caregiver relations, if I
had to give a simple answer (I probably wouldn’t except to you in order to move on) I’d agree
that it is not the same as a mother-child relationship, less prevalent. BUT, a lot depends on the
prior relationship between the people—some people provided care with a sense of okaeshi and
others with resentment. The okaeshi ones might be closer to amaeyakasu-ing. And the same
analysis of the power structure implied in Kondo’s work is true here as well. I remember one
DIL in particular who talked about how as her mother-in-law got weaker, she couldn’t boss her
around so much, and caregiving then because easier for the DIL to do. That caregiver seemed to
be providing really excellent care (not only assistance, but true caring) but it had to be from the
unequal relationship that ensued from her condition that the DIL could indulge her. This is a
really interesting example, and reminds me a lot of the movie “Jiro Dreams of Sushi,” and Jiro’s
different treatment of his atotsugi and his own 2nd son. There is a mechanism in J to pass
authority from G1 to G2, and has a parallel between the retiring HHH/atosugi and then his
spouse/DIL, passing on the shamoji between women. But what is the real relation between these
people after the event? The world is filled with rituals of reversal precisely to show that reversal
won’t work. So people use these symbolic forms to live their lives, and this creates some
sameness in peoples’ lives, but it does not end the range of variation and accommodation in lived
social relations. Obedience that arises from obligation (not to the person, but to the organization
to which they are both committed) seems like it would produce observable differences in
caregiving from care given from either sympathy for or deep emotional commitment to the
person getting care. Yet motives are so hard to get at, and we don’t even know our own
motivations ourselves, so how can we get at this in research? I wonder if all of the voicing of
appreciation we heard in our interviews from care recipients in the presence of the caregiver is
also a kind of amae-ing. Yet at the same time, I wonder if this is the right question. The chapter
I wrote in Anne Imamura’s edited volume on Japanese women lays out the features of what I
found to be a cultural definition of caregiving (whether for children or elders): physical comfort,
maintaining an akarui atmosphere, avoiding conflict, and this ideal does NOT include the
obligation to provide emotional support, discuss problems, or consider the elder’s mental health.
To me, those are the more useful features to consider, since the “requirement” to provide
emotional support or solve existential problems is not included in the ideal. Yes, this is entirely
my point, the point I came to with my research and other peoples’. All of these features you list
on both sides point to caring for, but not caring about, even within the cultural insistence on
respect for the elderly. After all, it is implicit in the obasuteyama story that the retired HHH has
passed on. If you think we disagree here, I’ve expressed myself very poorly indeed! This is
such a big difference to mothering for young children, it really makes me wonder a lot what the
future will be like in Japan in care for the elderly when (if that day ever comes) the chain of the
ie as a relay race is finally broken. It is not a circle at all, but, just as Fujita claims, a spiral. In
Doraemon, this still makes sense to people, that Nobita’s descendent from 150 years in the future
would know about Nobita and try to change his character for the sake of the future, the sake of
Nobita’s descendants. This could never be a premise for an American pop culture creation, since
no one has any idea about their great grandparents, and would never dream that changing
anything about them could influence their own lives, what with all of American being refreshed
and reinvented every few years. The reality of the rootless, violent cowboy spanned a period of
about 20 years, 1866 – 1877, Southern Civil War veterans willing to drive cattle from Texas to
the railhead in Kansas. And yet we are not rid of him to this day in our pop culture. I have not
got a better method than structuralism to get at the content of these popular cultural creations, but
I don’t have a method to get at what people get out of them. Any suggests in this area?
I hope this is the kind of feedback you were looking for. If you want more on where these
comments on elder care come from, I’ll attach references to some of the things I’ve written. A
number of years back I gave a talk at MSU that dealt with assistive devices and in the last part I
speculated a bit about robotic caregiving. I don’t seem to have it on my computer at home; if I
can find it Tuesday when I’m back at my office, I’ll send it if it seems useful—it’s just a
Powerpoint, not a flushed out piece.
Yes, please send the robot power point if you can lay your hands on it easily. This discussion
was extremely helpful. I just don’t see any way to make the whole thing less asynchronous.
There’s no question I’ve sacrificed the detail of real research for the sake of a set of symbols that
may not have the relevance or basis in experience they once might have had, but on the other
hand, Doraemon is still absurdly popular among children and their parents and this analysis of
the cartoon seems to make more sense to me than either anything else I’ve seen or anything else I
can come up with. And robots are in Japan’s future. So: If the elderly could have a caregiver
who would treat them in all ways the way mothers really do treat their children, would this make
lots of people feel better than their current reality? Even with the wide range of reality, would
you think so? And would this be a serious technological and maybe even moral mistake to aim at
this model of caregiving for the elderly in a robot?
Good luck with the manuscript. Thanks for allowing me to read and comment on it. I’m
honored that you thought of me.
Who else would I turn to about caregiving for the elderly in Japan? Thanks tremendously for
helping me with this.
Best wishes for a good summer and happy retirement,
Susan
Long, Susan Orpett. 2012. Bodies, Technologies and Aging in Japan: Thinking about Old
People and their Silver Products. Journal of Cross Cultural Gerontology 27:119–137. DOI
10.1007/s10823-012-9164-3
Long, Susan Orpett. 2012. Time, Change, and Agency in Japanese Elder Care. In Family, Ties
and Care: Family Transformation in a Plural Modernity. Hans Bertram and
Nancy Ehlert,
eds. Pp. 393-408. Opladen: Barbara Budrich Publishers. This is a translation of the original
German text in which the chapter appears.]
Long, Susan Orpett. 2011. Tension, Dependency, and Sacrifice in the Relationship of an
Elderly Couple. In Faces of Aging: The Lived Experiences of the Elderly in Japan. Yoshiko
Matsumoto, ed. Pp. 60-86. Stanford: Stanford University Press.
Long, Susan Orpett, Ruth Campbell and Chie Nishimura. 2009. Daughter-in-Law and Daughter
Elder Care in Japan: Is There Really a Difference? Social Science Japan Journal 12(1):1-21,
appearing online as doi: 10.1093/ssjj/jyn064.
Long, Susan Orpett. 2008. Someone’s Old, Something’s New, Someone’s Borrowed,
Someone’s Blue: Tales of Elder Care at the Turn of the 21st Century. In Imagined Families,
Lived Families: Culture and Kinship in Contemporary Japan. Akiko Hashimoto and John
Traphagan, eds. Pp. 137-158. Albany: SUNY Press.
Long, Susan Orpett. 1996. Nurturing and Femininity: The Impact of the Ideal of Caregiving in
Postwar Japan. In Re-Imaging Japanese Women. Anne Imamura, ed. Pp 156-176. Berkeley:
University of California Press.