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160 6 Compassionate Selves Women and Elder Care Various things happen in the life of a human, don’t they? In my life up to now, the saddest happenings are my father’s death and the death of my grandchild. From now on I intend to keep trying hard—I have the care of my mother, the care of my husband, and the care of my grandchildren. For my own sake, I have life-long learning and arts and volunteering to teach Japanese paper crafts at an old people’s home. Be careful of your body. Health is most important for both of us, isn’t it? Give my best to your husband and children, and take good care of your mother. Murata-san Letters from Japan give testimony of the growing number of elders and the personal choices that surround their care; we will return to Muratasan later in the chapter. Up to this point, we have discussed women forming personhood in spite of or outside of elder care, especially the care of in-laws, which has represented subordination and distasteful emotional dependency to many women in recent Japanese history. Yet elder care by women does not seem likely to end because 15 percent of the population of Japan was over 65 in 1995, and the government has predicted a crisis by 2025 when as much as a quarter of the population may be over 65 (Keizai Kikakuchò 1997, 28). Government policies in the ’90s continued to encourage family care: the majority of elder care falls on women, and women on average receive longer years of care. Thus this chapter is about women’s struggle with what kind of personhood women can construct around elder care and aging experiences. In the ’90s they were forced to wrestle once again with their various roles as actors: who they were as Japanese citizens, as individuals, as family members, as people in society, and as people who would go to “that world” after death as family ancestors . They faced anew the paradoxes between personal self and familybased virtues that they had lived with throughout their lives, but now there were new twists as government policies and families threw new lines, new roles, and new relationships into the action of the play. This chapter has two themes. One focuses on the relationship of nation Compassionate Selves 161 and citizen. As we hear of government policies on elder support and citizens ’ reactions, the high expectations that existed on both sides are clear. Government policies increasingly permeated everyday lives in Japan, simultaneously helping citizens and co-opting women’s independent action for national goals. Women responded both with trust and critique, but the critique asked for more, not less, government help with both finances and care. The second theme centers around the sense of self that women and nation began to forge around elder care. Government policies in the ’90s encouraged more independence but also more participation as members of family, community, and nation. These potentially contradictory ideas of independence and membership came together in a Japanese version of individuality featuring self-reliance and compassion. Women were encouraged to realize these qualities as they cared and were cared for within emotionally-based relationships, both at home and, now, within nonfamily relations. These expectations coalesced in a new emphasis on the spirit of volunteerism. Was this merely unpaid labor that took advantage of women’s socialization into nurturance, or was it an opportunity for women to use their womanly qualities independently on front stage? The women whose voices are heard in this chapter played cards of both resistance and resignation in reaction to the form of elder care dealt to them. They showed resourcefulness in gambling away older feminine virtues of self-sacrifice and endurance of suffering while retaining respect of self and others; in this case the highest prize was a sense of freed spirit—strength of character reinvented with more individual control over relationships and caregiving than in the past. As we shall see, some won the bet and some didn’t. Ultimately, these women showed an ability to look ahead to the future and a willingness to adapt to changes in family, community and nation. Problems with Government Policies On the one hand, government policies in the ’90s told elders to stay independent to the extent possible, “guaranteeing ‘self life’ by one’s self” ( jibun de jibun no seikatsu). Elders were not to burden the young, but to use their own assets and...

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