Japan in the late twentieth century was different from many contemporary Western societies in the marked division of its gender roles, with husbands stereotypically at work and their wives at home (Mathews, 2017: 230), as well as in the immense power of social pressure, restraining many of its members from venturing beyond dominant social norms in how they sought to live their lives. This had a definite effect upon the elderly in those years, particularly among men. The problem of what to do in one’s later years became conspicuous as a societal problem in Japan in the late 1980s and early 1990s. Men born in the Showa hitoketa eraFootnote 2 (1926–1935) had the reputation of finding their sense of life purpose (ikigai) only in work, and not knowing what to do with themselves after retirement (Mathews, 1996: 15). As one aging salaryman said in 1990 after being asked about his coming retirement, “If I had more free time, I don’t think I’d know what to do with it… If I had no work, I’d have to spend my time on my hobby or doing something I wanted to do. Every day would be a holiday; that would be a problem” (Mathews, 1996: 56–58). Books of that era describing the situation of older adults in Japan discussed how retired men may only watch TV and drink and become alcoholics, since they may have no inner resources through which to find something else to do with themselves (Takenaka, 2000: 44, 47).

Marital difficulties sometimes resulted after retirement in this era, with men seeing “every day as Sunday” lazing around the house and coming to be viewed by their wives as merely ‘sodai gomi,’ or oversized garbage (Yamaguchi, 2006: 11; Mathews 1996: 15). While many men had known only their companies, from which after retirement they were largely excluded, women of that era typically had more capacity than men to handle growing older, since the roles they played in the household continued without the sharp break of retirement, and also because many women had closer links to their neighborhood community and circles of friends. However, many women also had difficulty in finding what to do in older age. In 1990, an interviewee described the plight of her mother in her late sixties: “My mother says that she misses the past, when she raised us children. That was the most fulfilling time of her life, it seems. Now it seems as if she herself is a child” (Mathews, 1996: 197). Her mother became unhappy and complained frequently, as she did not in the past, because she no longer had any meaningful role to play in her life.

These women and men in the prime of their lives typically felt duty-bound to follow a role, whether as mother of children or as employee. These roles were highly involving and exacting. With their departure from these roles after their children left home or because of retirement from work, these people lost their primary place, and were essentially being asked to reinvent themselves apart from what had given them meaning and sustenance in the prime of their lives. After decades of devoting themselves to playing the roles of worker or mother, they often did not have the ability to do this.

With growing numbers of older adults facing the problem of not knowing what to do with themselves, numerous community centers (often labeled ‘ikigai sentaa,’ (‘ikigai centers’): places for finding ‘a purpose in life’) and rōjin daigaku (‘old people’s universities’) sprang up throughout Japan to cater to the needs of elders in the 1990s and early 2000s. I myself well remember giving various lectures in Japanese to rōjin daigaku in 2000 and being bemused to find that most of the people in my audiences were asleep. Who could blame them, I wondered. They were sleeping not simply because my Japanese was bad or my topic boring, although perhaps both of these were true. Rather, they simply weren’t interested in what I had to say—and why should they be? After having been compelled to give themselves completely to the social roles they played during the prime of their lives, these old people were now being asked to cultivate and develop themselves apart from those roles. But how, after surrendering themselves to their roles for so much of their lives, could they now in their old age realistically be asked to somehow find long-suppressed selves?

The above depiction of elders not knowing what to do with themselves has to some extent continued in recent years among the people I interviewed. I spoke with a woman in her sixties in 2011 who sounded very much like the woman described above from 1990, in her sense that, after raising her children to adulthood, she felt she had nothing to live for: “Life just isn’t interesting anymore,” she told me, in that her duty towards her children had ended, and there was nothing in her life that could take its place. Nonetheless, in the decades since the era described above, Japan has changed very significantly, and Japanese entering their late sixties and early seventies today generally seem to have more inner resources to handle leisure in their retirement age than many of the older Japanese I interviewed in earlier decades. My Japanese interviewees born in the postwar ‘baby boom’ era (1947–1949) and in the years thereafter have retired in diverse ways: some have continued paid work of various sorts, others have been devoted to volunteer work, others have been devoted to overseas travel, others to practicing traditional Japanese arts, and others to pursuing pastimes such as golf or fishing. These people were in the prime of life at the height of Japanese prosperity in the 1980s, but experienced in more recent decades Japan’s economic stagnation. Japan has become, over the past thirty years, a somewhat poorer and more diverse society, and forms of retirement have become more diverse as well.

The standard model of husband-as-corporate worker and wife-as-full-time-housewife in the 1960-1990s—statuses which were never enjoyed by the majority of Japanese but which were powerful as the middle-class ideal—are less prevalent and less hegemonic in a less prosperous Japan today.Footnote 3 This has led to a situation in which many older Japanese cannot enjoy their leisure in their older age, but must work. The sociologist Yamada Masahiro has described overhearing older adults saying that life in jail would be better for them since “they give you meals and you get medical care” (2009: 124), rather than having to worry about whether one’s low wages and meager savings can adequately cover one’s living expenses. There is indeed a very significant social-class difference in Japan today: only the relatively privileged can afford to enjoy leisure in their retirement. One of my oldest Japanese friends is today a taxi driver, now in his early seventies, after having had his design business fail and going through a divorce; he has no choice but to continue as a taxi driver for as long as he can, for he does not have enough money to retire.

My taxi-driving friend looks at retirement as an unattainable luxury. On the other hand, other Japanese men I know in their seventies, including a doctor with a small private clinic and an accountant working free-lance, choose to continue working even though financially they need not, in that their work gives their lives ongoing meaning, or at least “something interesting to do” in the accountant’s words. Others cannot work at paid employment, at least not at jobs in any way comparable to what they had once held as employees of large companies. If they cannot easily use computers, as many older Japanese I know cannot, then they may not be employable: contemporary technology may have rendered their skills of an earlier era obsolete. In any case, the former corporate employees I interviewed, even if their financial situations are not as comfortable as they might like, have no interest in working, simply because they do not need to.

Some of the elders I interviewed have instead been engaged in volunteering.Footnote 4 A former newspaper reporter now works as a volunteer helping to edit a newsletter for the disabled, which he explained in terms of doing something socially useful that he felt to be closely related to his earlier career. At a humbler level, an older woman who used to work as a nurse’s aide proclaimed, with pride, that the most important thing she did in her life was to walk around the park next to her house every morning and pick up the trash. This is what she could do to make the world immediately around her a little better each day, she felt. These two people in their different forms of volunteerism, formal and informal, maintained that their own choice of being a volunteer was not something everyone needed to follow, but was simply their own predilection. The former newspaper editor, when asked if it was justifiable that our mutual friend, an avid golfer, was not helping the world but simply playing golf, replied, “That’s fine! You can do whatever you want to do!” But the older man who retired to play golf was indeed criticized by another elder who continued to work: “He’ll have a mental crisis before long. You can’t retire and just play golf; that’s not enough.” I did not report this to my golfer friend—due to Covid-19 restrictions, I have not been able to interview since 2019, as earlier noted—but I am quite certain that he would respond by saying, “I spent forty years at a job I hated, working hard to help my company. Now I can do what I want to do!”

This touches upon a key question. What social obligation, if any, do older people in Japan have vis-à-vis their society? What responsibility do they have to ‘age productively’? The above comment criticizes my golfer friend not because he is not contributing to society, but rather because of the presumption that golf will ultimately not be enough to sustain his personal sense of happiness. All the Japanese older people I have interviewed maintained that how one spends one’s life in one’s older age is strictly a matter of personal choice; to repeat the words quoted above, “do whatever you want to do!” The people I interviewed said that they would definitely do all that they could to care for their spouse if their spouse became ill; they also would definitely help their children, and, to a lesser extent, their friends and neighbors. However, ‘contributing to society’ was something they never spoke of. Unlike the people I interviewed, however, many advice books for the aging in Japan have been more explicit in advocacy in their discussion of how old people should live.

The early 2000s was a time at which the retirement of the postwar baby-boomers in Japan led to a massive publishing boom of books on how older people should live. Advice books for older Japanese in the early 2000s typically depict post-retirement as daini no jinsei, one’s ‘second life.’ These books stress that one must carefully prepare oneself for this new self-motivated state, or else one may become like the retirees described earlier who watched TV and drank and became ‘oversized garbage.’ Several books published in this era state that one must find a raifu waaku (‘life work’) after retirement from work or childrearing (Yanagisawa, 2007: 187–188; Yamaguchi 2006: 60). This new ‘life work’ can be a hobby, or volunteering, but one must find such a ‘life work’ if one is to have a fulfilling older age.

This seems daunting: what if an older person cannot find a ‘life work’? It seems difficult to ask someone in their sixties, who has been immersed in roles in work and/or in raising children through their thirties, forties, and fifties to now, in their older age, be able to formulate through their own introspection and efforts a ‘life work.’ Although these books do not dismiss hobbies and other personal pursuits, they also emphasize how this ‘life work’ should be something that aids other people and society at large. As Yanagisawa maintains (2007: 190), “Leisure is not something that should end with your own enjoyment; rather, your enjoyment should be imparted to the world around you as well,” through teaching or advice or in other ways.

A prominent theme in books of this genre is that of ‘contributing to society’ (shakai ni kōken suru). Numerous Japanese books have advocated volunteer work and community service of various sorts for older people, but their explications for this advocacy differ. Some books say that older people have an obligation to society. Shibata (2002: 26–27) discusses one critical component of ‘successful aging’—a term he adopts from the English-language scholarly literature—as the individual’s ongoing ‘contributing to society,’ and identifies this as particularly Japanese, although Western theorists of aging have recently embraced it, he tells us. While one’s sense of purpose in life (ikigai) in Western societies has meant doing whatever one wants to do, in Japan ikigai means playing a role and achieving something within society, he writes. This means that older Japanese need to find their meaning from contributing to society, whether through volunteer work or childcare or in any way they can (Shibata, 2002: 33–38, 176–180). He bifurcates Japan and Western societies, in discussing Japanese-style ikigai as involving the playing of a social role, and contributing to society, unlike ikigai’s Western equivalents, which he sees as being more self-centered and selfish. This is empirically dubious,Footnote 5 but was perhaps ideologically useful to some readers in its claim that, as I bluntly paraphrase, “We Japanese, unlike selfish Westerners, find our meaning as elders in contributing to society and helping others.”

This cultural nationalist ideology was prominent in the 1970s, 1980s and 1990s in Japan through the ideology of Nihonjinron, discussing in multiplicities of volumes “who we Japanese are” (see Befu 2001), typically in distinction to ‘the West.’ But by the 2000s, this was receding in popular consciousness; books from the 2000s onward generally did not emphasize helping other people and aiding one’s society because of one’s ‘Japaneseness.’ Rather, they maintained that one should volunteer to help others because this is the optimal way for individuals to find meaning in their own lives. As one author writes, “After you retire, your social world will move from company to neighborhood….If you can be useful to others [by doing volunteer work in the community], you’ll undoubtedly be able to find ikigai [a sense of purpose in life] in making others happy” (Ono, 2004: 2–3). A more recent book for men on “how to die [and live] after age fifty” advises, “Don’t go to your local neighborhood association or shrine association [to volunteer your help]…only after you retire, because they won’t know you…and will think ‘you haven’t come here for all the decades while you were working.’ Begin going when you’re fifty, so that they’ll know you, and you can feel at home” (Hirokane, 2014: 22). This advice contains no mention of any obligation to aid others; it is strictly advice for being socially active and happy once one retires.

Other books are more explicit in rejecting any duty to contribute to society or to ‘productively age.’ These may maintain not simply that one should help others not for the sake of society but for oneself, but more radically, that one need not help others at all if one does not want to. The sociologist Ueno Chizuko found, on the basis of surveys conducted among the nyuu shirubaa, the ‘new silver’ generation of the postwar baby boom, that their dominant attitudes are “instead of living for others, live for yourself” when you are in your older age (Ueno, 2005: 264), and “play is more important than work” (2005: 262). It is not important to be useful to other people for these new elders, Ueno maintains; rather, “live as you want…enjoying your pastimes and hobbies” (2005: 266). It is clear from her commentary that she wholly approves of this attitude—one’s elder years should not be a matter of fulfilling duties towards society but rather towards finding happiness for oneself however such happiness may be found.

Just as advice-book writers have criticized the idea that one is obligated to live for others and contribute to society in one’s older age, so too more recent writers have criticized the idea that we need to have a ‘life work’ or a ‘life purpose.’ As one writer on aging tells readers, “people say that ‘if you don’t have a life purpose, your life will be wasted’….But I myself have never felt a life purpose; I’ve never felt the need for one, and it’s fine with me if I continue without a purpose until I die” (Kawakita, 2015: 223–224). As an advice book on happiness advocating alternative life courses maintains, “People say that ‘if you don’t work at something, it’s a waste of your life.’ That’s like their religion. I disagree with that” (Pha 2015: 24); “Working to contribute to society is a way of escaping your own meaninglessness” (2015: 51). These critiques do not represent the Japanese mainstream, but they do highlight a significant new trend in Japanese advice books: readers could almost certainly not find statements like this in advice literature from previous decades in Japan. I have discussed the diversification of Japanese ways of life in recent years, and these books very much reflect as well as encourage that diversification.

Advice books over the last several years continue this trend of advising elders to live as they themselves desire rather than as authorities and society advocate. A bestselling book by Wada Hideki (2022a) offers guidance for those in one’s eighties. It tells its readers to eat what they like without being too concerned about health (p. 30) and to enjoy pornography and masturbation if they so desire (p. 104), and also, “don’t search for ikigai [a sense of purpose in life]! Just look for things to do that are fun!” (p. 126–127). Another book, by Kamata Minoru (2021) discusses how “at seventy you can make your life more fun” by not trying too hard (gambaranai) (p. 172) and not caring about what other people think (p. 181): “decide your own way of life and death” (p. 107). Still another book, by Naito Izumi (2019) emphasizes that those who are terminally ill should free themselves from doctors’ orders, to leave the hospital to die as they themselves would like to die (p. 20–34). Books such as these do at points discuss ‘contributing to society’ or ‘being useful.’ But they do so in a different way from many books of earlier decades, emphasizing not that one has a duty to contribute to society, but rather that even when one is bedridden one can do something useful for others (Wada, 2022a: 172) as well as enjoying one’s life (Kamata, 2021: 31). The emphasis is on preserving one’s own psychological well-being in a state of perhaps terminal incapacitation.

Why has this change in advice for elders taken place in Japan? One factor is rising life expectancy—Japanese live on average some six years longer than they did in 1990. While a 65-year-old may be advised to ‘be productive,’ an 85-year-old may be advised simply to ‘be happy.’ Wada has written another, somewhat less-noticed book on how to live in one’s seventies (2022b), a book that offers rather different advice from his book on one’s eighties: it argues, among other things, that one should work after retirement, not to contribute to society but simply to avoid becoming bored: “Can you really stand doing nothing but playing for thirty years after retirement?” (p. 204), he asks, as if in echo of the criticism of my golf-playing friend discussed earlier. Keeping oneself active in childcare, social activities, or hobbies among elders in Japan has been interpreted by English-language ethnographers as not just a matter of individual desires but also as a way in which elderly Japanese feel that they can avoid becoming a burden on others: these activities may be seen as a means of avoiding senility and preserving one’s mental and physical health (Traphagan, 2000; Kavedzija 2019: 77–78). They are writing primarily about the very elderly whom Wada suggests should strive to ‘be happy’; they portray, as is also implied in the commentary on being bedridden discussed above, how ‘happy aging’ may be pursued not simply for one’s own individual bliss, but also in order to maintain one’s physical and mental well-being and the well-being of others within one’s social world.

Aside from longer life expectancy, there are also pivotal changes in Japanese cultural values that help to explain the shift in advice books from advocating ‘productive aging’ to ‘happy aging.’ As earlier noted, the cultural hegemony of the idealized Japanese lifecourse, of men as sarariimen working for companies and women as sengyō shufu, full-time housewives, has given way. Due to the bursting of the Japanese bubble in the 1990s, the ideal of lifetime employment has become insecure, as has too the ideal of being a full-time housewife (Holthus & Manzenreiter, 2017: 15–16), as individuals, particularly those of younger generations, scramble to find some niche for their skills in a new neoliberal Japanese world. This new situation has created much human misery, as Ozawa-de Silva has documented in her discussion of youth suicide (2021), and Horiguchi has discussed in terms of socially isolated youth (hikikomori) (2017); but it has also created greater opportunities for some, such as the unmarried Japanese women described by Nakano (2017), who have more social leeway to pursue their single lives than did women of their mothers’ era, and the young people who leave urban Japan to move to the countryside (Klien, 2020) in pursuit of better lives. Because the earlier Japanese hegemonic norms have lost much of their social power, there is more leeway in Japanese lives than was the case in decades past for people to live in ways that they themselves choose (Mathews, 2017), for elders as well as young people. This applies to the advice books we have been discussing. In the early 2000s, advice books were often prescriptive, reflecting a still-extant Japanese era of confidence as to how to live: authors could proclaim, ‘find your second life,’ or ‘contribute to society’ and find an audience that would pay heed. Today, such overarching advice is less likely to be listened to; seniors cannot be told how to live except as they themselves see fit, the advice books we have looked at seem to show.

I earlier discussed neoliberalism in terms of ‘productive aging,’ implying that elders too must stay ‘productive,’ fitting capitalist modes of value. But another, more positive side of neoliberal values is that they place the responsibility for one’s life upon the individual rather than upon coercive societal norms. In Japan, because the society as a whole has lost confidence in the validity of its earlier social ideals, it has lost some of its socially coercive power, and neoliberalism takes on a freer tinge—not for those Japanese who must work in their old age to survive, as discussed earlier, but for those who have enough money to live on. For them, they are indeed free of the obligation to ‘contribute to society,’ and can move from ‘productive aging’ to ‘happy aging,’ as the recent advice books we have examined urge them to do.

This leads to a larger question. Can we judge how people choose to spend their lives as they age? If such a judgment is valid, then the term ‘productive aging’ may indeed be useful. But if we cannot make such a judgment, then it may not be useful and perhaps even dangerous. One key to this analysis lies, I argue, in the contested meanings of ‘happiness,’ as I will now explore.