Growing Old in Japan

   It's been years since I visited Japan, a country rich in heritage and history.  I experienced one of my déjà vu moments outside a royal palace in Kyoto, a scene of having been there before only centuries earlier.  It puzzled me since I had little knowledge or background on the area and yet the image was as clear and as real as such déjà vu incidents are.  It was a shock to discover that the efficiency of the culture led to people being both rude and courteous, the timeliness of the trains leading to people pushing and bumping and crowding; yet when I missed my stop due to trying to "politely" exit he train, a young man got off with me at the next stop and escorted me to the correct platform to get back...who does that?  It was routine in Japan, I discovered.  The trains, as with so much else, is run like clockwork.  If a train is scheduled to leave at 8:02, then the doors shut at exactly that moment (much of what my wife and I experienced in Europe's rail system was the same, one subway in Paris catching her bag and the passengers valiantly trying to kick it out of the door before it was ripped apart by the exiting subway; they were successful and a gentleman there also got off and escorted my wife to my waiting self at the next stop, so such courtesy might just be worldwide).  In Japan, I was traveling alone, young and full of trying new adventures, from staying in ryokans to riding all-night trains to avoid hotel bills (I was on a budget and did so well that my entire trip cost me just several hundred dollars, not counting airfare; of course I ate a lot of noodles).  I would watch as the countryside grew more and more rural, exemplified by the mechanized rice planter wheels slowly giving way to people planting the strands manually, one by one (in California, rice is precision-dropped by airplane seeders).  English became more and more distant and my limited Japanese soon became little more than hand motions; but somehow I made it (some of this I wrote about in an earlier post).

   Perhaps it shouldn't be surprising that attempting to revisit one's earlier travels or destinations can prove disheartening.  Restaurants close, sites become more crowded, prices jump upward...things just don't seem as alive as before.  Think of your own city and how much has changed, how much more busy it's become and how many more cars seem to be on the road.  To someone who hasn't been to see you in a decade or so, the changes likely appear even more stark (as with you returning to an old haunt).  When people ask if I'd care to return to a city I've lived in or to places I've visited (for the most part, a chunk of my life was in San Francisco and areas north of the bridge), I tend to reply that I'd like to return to my memory of that place but also to that time period as well for my recollection of its fun and beauty and experiences were in a time when the society and culture were different.  As was I...

Entrance to Todaiji Temple in Nara, Japan...from Japan Guide

   What I remember most about my visit to Japan was its deep ties to its history; granted that traditions are kept throughout the world's cultures, and that today's world is far different everywhere.  But in Japan, the old and the new seemed such stark contrasts, loosely-packed straw brooms still efficiently sweeping off stairs and walkways, temples still preserved and polished (the temple in Nara outside of Kyoto once had the world's largest wooden pillars as its entryway), pachinko parlors still captivating the crowds as tightly as Las Vegas.  Those were some of my memories.  So it saddened me to read about another side Japan growing older, of a new tradition emerging, that of its elderly heading to prison.

   This changing face of going to prison is not really new, as shown by our own prison statistics.  A new book by author Alisa Roth exposed some of this happening in the U.S. with a short excerpt of her book appearing in The Atlantic saying: Across the country, correctional facilities are struggling with the reality that they have become the nation’s de facto mental-health-care providers, although they are hopelessly ill-equipped for the job.  In Michigan, for example, roughly half of all the people in county jails have a mental illness, and nearly a quarter of the people in state prisons do.  Nearly half of the people executed nationwide from 2000 to 2015 had been diagnosed with a mental illness or substance-use disorder in their adult life.  In 2010, about 30 percent of the people at New York’s Rikers Island jail had a mental illness; by 2017, the figure had risen to 43 percent...The mental-health crisis is especially pronounced among women prisoners.  One study by the U.S. Bureau of Justice Statistics found that 75 percent of the women incarcerated in both jails and prisons had a mental illness, compared with just over 60 and 55 percent of men, respectively.  In Oklahoma’s largest women’s prison --where substance use (a common form of self-medication for people with mental illness) is a major driver of incarceration-- 90 percent of the prisoners are receiving some form of mental-health treatment.  
 
    But in Japan, the prisoners are not so much mentally ill as they are just getting old and getting lonely.  Said the photo-essay in Bloomberg Businessweek: Why have so many otherwise law-abiding elderly women resorted to petty theft?  Caring for Japanese seniors once fell to families and communities, but that’s changing.  From 1980 to 2015, the number of seniors living alone increased more than sixfold, to almost 6 million.  And a 2017 survey by Tokyo’s government found that more than half of seniors caught shoplifting live alone; 40 percent either don’t have family or rarely speak with relatives. T hese people often say they have no one to turn to when they need help.  Even women with a place to go describe feeling invisible. “They may have a house. They may have a family. But that doesn’t mean they have a place they feel at home,” says Yumi Muranaka, head warden of Iwakuni Women’s Prison, 30 miles outside Hiroshima. “They feel they are not understood.  They feel they are only recognized as someone who gets the house chores done.”  At some facilities, being a correctional officer has come to resemble being a nursing-home attendant.  A more detailed study of this rising trend appeared in a study by Custom Products which offered one possible solution: Would Japan be better off building large scale dormitories that would include medical facilities in return for pension sacrifice?  This way these pensioners could trade off prison life for state sponsored shelters at one would expect a fraction of the cost of adding to prison population.  Surely if the government met potential pickpocketing pensioners half way then it would be preferable to both parties on cost and shame grounds.  It goes on to ask if already-profitable care facility developers would benefit from government subsidies and working for a way to alleviate the burden, one both fiscal and psychological.  But one has to wonder if Japan's model could be simply another form of innovation worldwide?

   Japan is certainly not perfect and has its own controversies, including its well-publicized slaughter of dolphins and whales, the most recent of which involved over a hundred that were pregnant.  It's done in the name of "research" but whale meat is delicacy and treasured as much as its crafting of scotch (of which many books have been written citing their besting of some of Scotland's finest).  But this is overall a land of detail and precision, of history and tradition...and it appears that some of that just might be again changing.  Adult diapers now outsell children's diapers, reflecting the rising post-65 age group, one that will represent 40% of the country in just 40 years.  So the marketing begins, and none might be so revolutionary as its engay food.  Think baby food that's somewhat attractive.  In a piece in The Atlantic, it was described as "choke-proof food" since more elderly die in Japan from choking than they do from traffic accidents.  Says the short piece: Instead of settling for, say, a cup of Ensure-brand pudding, throw some cooked salmon in a blender.  Then, with a little help from modern chemistry, mold the resulting pink puree back into the shape of a fillet, and add “grill” marks with a propane torch.  Presto: salmon that looks like it was plated in a restaurant and almost tastes that way, minus the flaky texture.  Still, the Japan I visited appears to be not that different from the Japan of today for it has aged much as I have; in that respect Japan and I share a few similarities.  But there is one big difference, summed up in the piece on engay food: “It’s a difference of cultures,” explains Koichi Yanagisawa, a marketing executive for Nutri (a maker of nutritional foods there).  America serves its eldest residents mush; Japan serves them salmon à la torche.