Aging is not all about ending, loss, and death, but about people's continuing efforts to make their lives meaningful and worthwhile. By suggesting this important yet easily neglected idea, Iza Kavedžija explores how elderly Japanese men and women deal with an existential question – how to make their lives meaningful. To examine this existential issue, the author relies on her thorough ethnographic research in a salon established by a local non-political organization (NPO) in Osaka that serves as a place where elderly Japanese share both their stories and companionship. By highlighting how the elderly Japanese, volunteers in the salon, and the NPO work to build meaningful lives through conversations and exchange of stories, Kavedžija eventually reveals care as a mutual dependency, and that is the key in helping the elderly Japanese to lead meaningful lives. In other words, people establish their lives of worth by caring for others, while at the same time being cared for by others. Furthermore, the salon and the NPO – the local community that supports elderly welfare with the help of the government – are at the heart of creating such a community of care.
Under this overarching theme of care and making lives meaningful, in each chapter (after her two introductory chapters) Kavedžija uncovers what she thinks is the essence of creating this community of care for elderly Japanese, that is, balance. In Chapter 3, by demonstrating how NPO volunteers understand community ties and relationships the elderly have made, she emphasizes the need to create balanced relationships that do not impede one's privacy (in the name of caring), but at the same time maintains that a personal network is the key to creating lives of well-being. Namely, “maintaining a minimal distance from potentially intrusive others” (p. 59) is the major concern for volunteers at the NPO to guarantee a good life for elderly Japanese that is filled with rich social relationships. Chapter 4 shifts its focus to the elderly visitors to the salon in order to highlight their efforts to maintain personal but not intimate relationships with each other through their conversations and activities that serve to enhance their lives. Echoing the previous chapter, the author argues that a balance between individual freedom and collective sociality enables well-being. Chapters 5, 6, and 7 are filled with life stories of the various social actors who form the salon's loose network, ranging from the regular elderly visitors to the salon, to volunteers and helpers, and the NPO. These chapters share two common ideas: first, given the life narratives the elderly share about Japanese society, in particular its cultural expectations and their own positioning in a larger society, analysis of these life narratives significantly reveals how they construct a sense of a good life. Second, all these relevant actors who are building community ties for the elderly citizens work hard to create a balance between suffocating social relations and an indifferent community. This effort envisions a sense of meaningful engagement in community activities.
Overall, the main theme of this book catches our attention in particular because its discussions of care, aging, and community help (through civil organizations) are novel in terms of their approach. Many previous researches on care, aging, and civil support have tended to spotlight either historical and political perspectives to show how neoliberal social restructuring has shaped new formations of civilian engagement in care, or a gendered analysis to explore how low-paying female care workers complicate the relationships of care, love, and money. Kavedžija's book certainly provides an innovative analytic lens through which to understand aging and care neither as a deliberate political and economic means to serve neoliberal governmentality, nor as a definite gendered outcome serving to aggravate gender inequality. Instead of highlighting the care system from political economic perspectives, this study focuses on the existential question regarding aging and care to elaborate that aging and care do not simply create a one-sided dependency, but instead a mutual system of help among concerned individuals engaged in this loosely woven community network. Furthermore, the idea of balancing sociality and a sense of freedom is an especially interesting concept to illustrate the tension in Japanese culture that is largely considered a community-based society. Namely, though Japan has been conventionally considered as a culture that suffocates individuals by its collective rules of caring, individuals in this book are looking for a way to make the lives of elderly Japanese worthwhile by forming a balance between the individual and society.
Many of the interesting points the book raises do not provide a clear picture of what the implications of the government welfare policies are in shaping such a balanced relationship. In other words, the book does not clearly indicate the relationships between government policies and the creation of the balanced community that seems to shape meaningful lives of the elderly. In Chapters 2 and 3, Kavedžija elaborates the change in government welfare policies affecting elderly citizens, including the birth of a mutual help system (tasukeai in Japanese) and its shift to a long-term care insurance system. Kavedžija also asserts that the change in government welfare policies strongly influences NPO activities in that government policies co-opt the voluntary sector and the NPO into building community help systems. Although government policies impact the making of a local community help system, they do not create a balanced relationship. In this sense, the book would have benefited from better illustrating the processes by which the Japanese NPO interprets the changes in government policies and decides on a model for community help; it would have nicely delineated the missing link between the government policies and a balanced community relationship.
The book also lacks a sufficiently critical approach to ferreting out the social cost of government policies crucial in the making of community help systems. In Chapter 3, it is clear that welfare policies are mobilized by the relatively cheap labor of married women to fill the gap in elderly care, but that they were never given proper remuneration or social recognition. By not focusing on such social costs of the government welfare system, Kavedžija instead simply emphasizes the work of the volunteers and helpers in this welfare system and how they are trying to make their work look not as labor but more like a mission or extension of their family care obligation. Although the book spotlights the positive outcome of a government system that has led to interested parties working in harmony, the policies have created an extremely high turnover in the field of care (wo)manpower due to insufficient monetary reward and low social recognition. In this sense, the book might have adopted a more balanced perspective if it had included narratives of those volunteers and helpers who had quit their positions, rather than simply highlighting those who continue their care work and who are supported by their own stable socioeconomic background, such as by well-paid husbands.
To conclude, the approach of the book is novel, in that it connects aging and care to the notion of a “balance” that Japanese people want to build through the community tie. However, it lacks a critical lens through which to analyze the “system” that the government establishes as the base for this community tie.
