The elderly population in Japan is quite visible and active. In my apartment building there is a store that caters to their needs, selling walkers and other technologies, and almost every department store has a fancy wig store in it, catering to elderly women who still want to look their best. Japan has a very good approach to accessibility, with guides on every sidewalk for the visually impaired and the atms in the convenience store offering built-in hooks for canes. While I think the US and every country should do the same, maybe these features are more pressing in Japan because of the aging population.
I see the eldery walking around town, many are so hunched they are literally hinged at the waist at 90-degree angles. But they still manage to be very independent, apparently. Every day I see them working in restaurants or stores, carrying loads of heavy bags, getting on and off trains, and walking home very slowly on these very narrow streets. The hunched posture was kind of shocking at first. I have looked into it a bit and found someone saying that many from the generation who grew up during the poverty-stricken post-war period were malnourished, and it affected their bones. I wonder if it is that, or just that the elderly are so much more visible here.
I have one student who is 86 years old. She tells amazing stories from her memories of growing up, incredibly slowly (she has some health problems that I think affect her language recall), as she reflects on her life and tells me how she’s, in her words, actively preparing for death. Sometimes the lessons get intense, especially when she one day ended up recalling memories of the atom bomb in expressing her hatred of Abe and his push to re-militarize Japan.
She spent her summer holiday going through her things, getting her affairs in order, and has been telling me about things she finds. She recently came across a letter of apology her deceased husband wrote her when they were in their thirties. She told me matter of factly she married the wrong man and would’ve been happier with her deceased-husband’s brother, her brother-in-law, who she still sees every month when he invites her to eat at the tempura restaurant he owns and operates. The apology letter was over her husband buying a business and running it into the ground all without telling her. The business was an art dealership. His main career had been chemistry, but he had always considered himself a great artist. She didn’t think he was so great, just ok for an amateur. She thinks his older brother, actually, was a great artist. The older brother married a woman who became demonic, she explained by way of raising devil horns with her fingers on her head. Even though the wife is a good person, she argued with him over money, as the brother-in-law loves life and socializing and spent all their money on parties and frivolities.
She recently spent a whole year in the hospital but has since been released and now leads a very active life, going to see every new movie, taking care of her grandchildren, and taking English classes almost every day.
The Japanese staff approached me the other day and asked how she was doing in class. I said, ‘well, you know, great, all considered… it’s hard to tell whether her struggles have more to do with English ability or her age. As you know, she was recently in the hospital for a year…’ They look concerned, but not about that. Apparently, they told me, she has recently decreased her lessons from two-per-day to one. They asked her why, and she said it was because she got too cold in the classrooms. The temperature has been in the nineties or above every day this summer, and I had been pouring sweat in the lesson. Too cold? Yes, they went on, very concerned. So, when they see her coming, they always turn up thermostat…(‘oh…I thought, no wonder I am pouring sweat right now’), but she says she is still too cold.
I walked away from that interaction confused on so many levels. Mainly, I’m concerned this woman is trying to tell us something when every day she wants to talk about death and dying, and complains to the staff that she is too cold. Also, I wonder if we should be pushing her to take more lessons???? But the Japanese staff at the school are tasked with sales, and subject to meeting competitive quotas for student sign-ups. Many nights they work after hours until midnight, dealing in minute detail with the aesthetics of the school and other aspects of customer service. An ungenerous interpretation is that no customer is too old or unwell for a sale, and a generous one is that they are just genuinely concerned with her comfort in our presence.
Most of the elderly students I teach are quite sharp, chatty, and glamorous. I was once teaching a class to two retired women, both of them grandmothers, both of them dressed to the nines, with stylish hairstyles and beautiful clothes. One of them also takes rock drumming lessons, the other dances hula. They both started sharing stories about caring for their mothers, who were both still alive. One of them shared that their mother was in the hospital. The other of their mothers had just gotten out of the hospital. One of the women shared her mother had gone to the hospital after being hit by a car while walking on a narrow street. I had often worried that this would happen a lot. The streets really are extremely narrow and there are no sidewalks, so they share the lane with cars, and like I said some of the pedestrians are extremely old. Actually, she said it was a very funny story, and her mother has since totally recovered. Since she’s been home from the hospital, my student and her brother have discovered they had the story a bit wrong. Really their mother tripped and fell near a car that was going very slowly on a narrow street. The driver was so kind, she said, he panicked thinking he was responsible. He called the ambulance and had his insurance pay for it. Now she is unsure if she has to call the driver and somehow explain what really happened and apologize.
Most people as a rule in Japan are older than they look. I’ve learned not to be surprised when someone I thought was around my age turns out to have fully grown kids. Some of the older men are in great shape and tan from playing tennis or running marathons. One of my students who does both asked to ‘free-talk’ the other day. He told me he will be retiring in five years, and he has been thinking about what he wants to do with the rest of his life after he stops working for his company. (This put him at 65 or 70, as Japanese people retire after 70, but he looks much younger, so I was surprised that he is still extremely handsome, like a Japanese Harrison Ford).
He is actually not a movie star but a chemist. He struggled to explain to me the history of the chemistry and pharmaceuticals industry in Japan. Basically for a long time Japan had been the center of the chemicals industry in Asia. But in recent years it has been outsourcing to developing countries like Thailand, where it is much cheaper, but the pay is lower, as is the quality. So my student has been thinking for a while about what he should do with the rest of his life after he retires. And finally he has decided he wants to travel to developing countries to provide training to chemists there. His goal is to bring them into Japan, where they can earn higher salaries and have a better quality of life. For this he needs to keep practicing his English, as it’s the international language. He even seemed to get a bit teary as he proudly said ‘This is the first time I have ever spoken of my plan in English.’ The lesson was very kandou.
(couldn't resist taking a photo of this woman’s outfit, typical retired lady style)