Abstract
The aging society crisis in Japan represents a point of saturation, when the numbers of elderly in-need-of-care exceed the available resources, leading to economic, societal, and national collapse. The aging society crisis is an agent of change, a future potentiality that is inextricably linked with enactments of and approaches to aging, old age, and sociality in present-day Japan. The passing of Japan’s national long-term care insurance in 2000 opened up new possibilities, new ground on which to compare and contrast, to carve out meaning, identity and particularities. I discuss a differentiation currently underway between the ordering of people, things, institutions, and ideas involved in “prevention” versus that of “care”. Topologically, I argue, care and prevention are noticeably distinct orders of being. But, with an analysis of temporality, we discover that prevention is an action motivated by an anticipatory future that effects change in the present, while care is a direct evincing of the feared-for future. Both care and prevention are thus united in a shared becoming that is the aging society crisis. Engaging the future as an ethnographic object presents opportunities for innovative theoretical exploration and development. How do we go about analysing an object that lacks substantial existence, yet displays agency in the present by organizing networks of relations and motivating change? How might we theoretically frame and approach the future? This research analytically explores futurity as a force of change not unlike power, information and action, by applying the theory of ontogenesis and cybernetics.
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- 1.
In 2013, the birth-rate is estimated to have been 1.39 children born per woman. The average life expectancy was 80.85 years for men and 87.71 years for women (CIA World Factbook, 2013).
- 2.
According to a study conducted by the Ministry of Health, Labour, and Welfare, due to the number of lives lost in the March 11, 2011, Great East Japan Earthquake, for the last three years Japan has had to forfeit the title of “world’s most aged nation,” the first time it has done so in 27 years. The national average age of Japanese women is now second to Hong Kong, and Japanese men have taken up eighth place (Due to the great earthquake, 2012).
- 3.
In the most recent LTCI reform of April 2014, the Ministry of Health, Labour and Welfare has removed two levels – Support levels 1 and 2 – that had care-prevention components from LTCI coverage and administration (Ministry of Health, Labour, and Welfare, 2014). Support levels 1 and 2 are now included in a “New Care-Prevention System” (shin kaigo yobo seido), becoming the responsibility of the regional, as opposed to the national, government to design, promote, and run. With this 2014 reform, care and care-prevention have become completely topologically differentiated, split into different institutions and administrations. When Support levels 1 and 2 were included in LTCI, the national government was obligated to provide a standard of service and support to prevent continued functional decline, but now prevention has separated from care to form its own system alongside other prevention services and programmes.
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Ricart, E. (2017). Engaging the Future as Ethnographic Object: Japan’s Aging Society Crisis, Ontogenesis and Cybernetics. In: Samanta, T. (eds) Cross-Cultural and Cross-Disciplinary Perspectives in Social Gerontology . Springer, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-10-1654-7_7
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