Summary of SEAA READS, session two, 6/2022
Saturday, the 4th of June, the book group joined Zoom to talk about the book, the methods, and the wider topic of elderly life in Japan. Based on 2009 and 2010 fieldwork in Osaka that resulting in 2019 publication, Making Meaningful Lives by Iza Kavedzija, draws from participant observation at community centers that welcome one and all, but particularly the elderly from nearby. The session host, Bill Kelly, supplied three questions to stir thoughts for sharing. More than ½ of the 16 people present on the screen spoke or used the chat function to share reactions and questions. Some of the point brought up follow.
-The community salon in south Osaka is a kind of “3rd space” that is neither home, nor work. In some respects it compares to coffee shops (kissaten) or karaoke facilities, but not constrained by for-profit concern and not limiting incomers to small rooms.
Near the end of the 90-minute Zoom time the question of a USA functional equivalent to the ethnography site was speculated to be a charity shop where volunteers swap stories and mingle with the shoppers seeking a bargain or an undiscovered high-value item.
-The particular point of comparison from 1970’s Barbara Myerhoff came up several times, for its focus on Holocaust survivors making a new life at a community center in Venice Beach, near Los Angeles. Person and interpersonal drama and dialog comprise much of Myerhoff, while Kavedzija dwells on details of largely undramatic, daily interchanges of staff and volunteers and elderly people who regularly spend time together at the community salon.
-OMOIYARI is taught to students and celebrated in popular culture, but almost always the impulse is to give care or material to others. Seldom is there celebration or showcasing the receiving rule-play: how to gratefully receive what other’s are giving.
-Readers noticed a lot of attention given to talking about food: past high points or current and future advice to others. In this way, rather than making small talk about the weather, it is food that animates polite conversation and information sharing. In other words, food is an idiom for social exercise or it is a currency to exchange with others.
-The facts of aging provide a common denominator to visitors at the community center, not only for problem solving and expressing needs and responding to other’s needs, but narrating or putting into words those experiences is a kind of theatrical stage for each person to perform in front of others. Rather than to build dramatic tension in space, it is the flow of time that organizes the rising and falling dramatic turns in one’s own story.
Furthermore, not only is the axis for playing out stories based on time, not space, but one’s place in a family or neighborhood can continue in some way post-mortem, too, so long as living people know your name and remember you. Thus the experience of aging is not limited to looking back but also looking ahead, including to a phase after one’s own death.
-The presence of a (foreign) ethnographer concerned with gathering and presenting (whole) life stories tends to produce articulated lives of some (imagined) logic. By contrast, people quietly living their lives without an outside person to show interest and take steps to document one’s life are much less likely to have a panoramic picture of their entire life. Therefore, what appears on the pages of the book are articulated lived, in some way at the hand of the ethnographer. A more representative set of lives would be less articulated and derivative to the (foreign) fieldworker.
=-= The next edition of SEAA Reads will be hosted by Jie Yang on October 1, 2022. The book is
Palmer, David and Elijah Siegler. 2017. Dream Trippers: Global Daoism and the Predicament of Modern Spirituality. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
P.S. Among the Zoom chat stream came the following remarks.
[M] Has anyone seen a rather old documentary, “When Traditional Mechanisms Vanish: Aging in Japan” - focused on three inhabitants of a Nagoya bath house. Very interesting use of a locale that becomes an unintended rojin hoomu
[D] An Enlightening Conversation... Thanks, Bill and everyone, especially David Plath, whose comments are always so insightful... Lifecourse and life stories really are about what he calls 'the convoy’ and those 'long engagements.’ I am struck by how so many folks in Japan continue to be engaged in learning throughout life (or lifelong learning, if you will). Crafting caring relationships, as Jie said. I appreciated the quieter approach Iza brought to this work. I knew Iza at Oxford years back and have met her in Osaka over the years and talked with her about her fieldwork. What especially struck me at those times was how she would always smile when she was talking about her communities… Great point, btw, from Corky on omoiyari as a two-way street… IKIRU and ikigai again…. A valuable ethnography…
Knowing in terms of being there - Guven…
Great comments from Jieun on the kimono and its meaning [survivor of Fukushima disaster] … How ikigai is portrayed in Kurosawa's IKIRU is so interesting, too... “Values of Happiness" is an article Iza and her husband wrote, btw...
Thank you for Christine's notes on gender and class... And especially ableist assumptions (Many in Japan)… Oh my, we would all have different comments on the proposal than Roger [Oxford anthropology] did, I think!!
Great comments on 'the good life' by Gavin... The Thrift Store, oh yes… More 'long engagements’… So true on different groups that are not part of a community, don't want to be part of a particular community. I saw this over the years in my work at the Asahi Newspaper's Culture Center with folks. A side note, I believe Iza has continued to do research in Suita… YES on social drama, too. Thank you, Joshua…. Sorry, I have to go now... Great talk!!
[J] To the point of ablism - I also wondered if there was any story about 老人介護 - I might have missed this (skimming through the book)!
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