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ix Acknowledgments Parts of Chapters 2 and 3 are significantly revised portions of articles. “Senility as Disintegrated Person in Japan” originally appeared in the Journal of Cross-Cultural Gerontology 17:253–67 (Traphagan 2002), “The Oddness of Things: Morality Games and Interpretations of Social Change Among Elders in Rural Japan” originally appeared in The Asia Pacific Journal of Anthropology 10(4):329–47 (Traphagan 2009). These are included here with kind permission of Springer Science and Business Media and Taylor and Francis (http://www.informaworld.com), respectively . Chapter 4 originally appeared as “Interpretations of Elder Suicide, Stress, and Dependency Among Rural Japanese” in Ethnology (Traphagan 2004b), and I am very appreciative of that journal for allowing me to use the article here. Data for this book were collected during several trips to Japan between 1995 and 2010, funded by a variety of sources, including a Fulbright Doctoral Research Fellowship and grants from the Michigan Exploratory Center for the Demography of Aging, the Northeast Asia Council of the Association for Asian Studies, The American Philosophical Society, the Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research, the National Institute on Aging (grant number R03 AG016111-01), and the Mitsubishi Japan Endowment at the University of Texas at Austin. The support is greatly appreciated. There are numerous people to thank for support and comments throughout the writing of this book. First, I thank Kirsten Cather, Robert Oppenheim, and Thomas Tweed of the University of Texas at Austin and L. Keith Brown of the University of Pittsburgh for their very helpful comments on various drafts. Second, many thanks to my father, Willis Traphagan, for content and editorial comments throughout writing. The work also benefited from the help of my assistant Emiko Miyagawa Linville who gathered some of the sources used, Maeri Megumi who reviewed Japanese terms for accuracy, and Anthony Wright who x Acknowledgments reviewed the entire manuscript, provided editorial assistance, and assisted in creating the index. Peggy Bowler Lindsey raised some fascinating points from a clinical perspective that stimulated my thinking about the manuscript. I am quite appreciative of all of their help in the preparation of the manuscript. And, finally, I want to express my love and appreciation to Tomoko, Julian, and Sarah for their patience, love, and support. Note on Conventions Throughout this book, I make use of Japanese words and sources. For words that are difficult to translate into English, I typically make use of Romanized Japanese accompanied by the actual Japanese written word. In many cases, I have chosen to simply include Japanese characters in parentheses following a translation. This is somewhat different from custom in writing books about Japan, where normally the trend is to Romanize all Japanese words. I am working from the assumption that those who know Japanese will be able to read the characters and that for those who do not know Japanese, the Romanized version of the word is not particularly useful. All of the names of individuals who participated in my research mentioned in this volume are pseudonyms in order to protect their­identities. ...

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