Overview

In Through Japanese Eyes, based on her thirty-year research at a senior center in upstate New York, anthropologist Yohko Tsuji describes old age in America from a cross-cultural perspective. Comparing aging in America and in her native Japan, she discovers that notable differences in the panhuman experience of aging are rooted in cultural differences between these two countries, and that Americans have strongly negative attitudes toward aging because it represents the antithesis of cherished American values, especially independence. Tsuji reveals that American culture, despite its seeming lack of guidance for those aging, plays a pivotal role in elders' lives, simultaneously assisting and constraining them. Furthermore, the author's lengthy period of research illustrates major changes in her interlocutors' lives, incorporating their declines and death, and significant shifts in the culture of aging in American society as Tsuji herself gets to know American culture and grows into senescence herself. Through Japanese Eyes offers an ethnography of aging in America from a cross-cultural perspective based on a lengthy period of research. It illustrates how older Americans cope with the gap between the ideal (e.g., independence) and the real (e.g., needing assistance) of growing older, and the changes the author observed over thirty years of research.

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9781978819566

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Reviews

Yohko Tsuji offers carefully crafted prose and an inviting tone that welcomes the reader to share her three decades of research on community-based aging. She begins with a critical overview of the anthropological scholarship on aging, giving students and colleagues a firm foundation in anthropological approaches to aging and why they are distinctly powerful. A native of Japan, she draws on both emic and etic perspectives in discussing how culture informs social networks based on mutual support, friendship, kinship and proximity. --Maria Vesperi co-editor of Anthropology off the Shelf: Anthropologists on Writing Through Japanese Eyes is a warm and sympathetic portrait of mutual support and cooperation among older people in the US. Spanning from the 1980s through to the present day, it reveals the value of long-term personal engagement with a research site and subject matter. --Iza Kavedzija author of Making Meaningful Lives: Tales from an Aging Japan

Aging in America: Professors study offers hope for fear of getting old by Matt Steecker-- The Ithaca Journal Yohko Tsuji offers carefully crafted prose and an inviting tone that welcomes the reader to share her three decades of research on community-based aging. She begins with a critical overview of the anthropological scholarship on aging, giving students and colleagues a firm foundation in anthropological approaches to aging and why they are distinctly powerful. A native of Japan, she draws on both emic and etic perspectives in discussing how culture informs social networks based on mutual support, friendship, kinship and proximity. --Maria Vesperi co-editor of Anthropology off the Shelf: Anthropologists on Writing Through Japanese Eyes is a warm and sympathetic portrait of mutual support and cooperation among older people in the US. Spanning from the 1980s through to the present day, it reveals the value of long-term personal engagement with a research site and subject matter. --Iza Kavedzija author of Making Meaningful Lives: Tales from an Aging Japan Anthropologist examines aging in U.S. 'Through Japanese Eyes, ' by Kate Blackwood https: //news.cornell.edu/stories/2020/11/anthropologist-examines-aging-us-through-japanese-eyes-- Cornell Chronicle

Author Information

YOHKO TSUJI is an adjunct associate professor of anthropology at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York. 

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