Built Environment and Lifestyle

Dealing with an Aging Population At Home

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It is no secret that Japan has the fastest-ageing population on earth. While much of the discourse is pessimistic, focusing on the social upheaval that a graying society will cause, it is also an opportunity for Japan to take the lead and show other countries how to deal with a shrinking workforce and a swelling number of pensioners, many of whom require care.

One of the measures the government is taking is gradually raising the age at which people can receive their pensions, which will reach 65 in 2025. However, while encouraging people to work later in life is important to deal with this demographic shift, it is also necessary to take into account the decrease in physical strength and mobility that goes with age, and design a suitable living and working environment. As can be seen in the “Basic Living Plan” approved by the Japanese cabinet in 2006, measures are being taken to ensure that people can remain living in their homes for as long as possible by installing “barrier-free” equipment that makes their living environment more accessible.

Beyond hardware solutions, Japan is also applying technology to offer more flexible services to older people. The use of robots, sensors and the cloud in cutting-edge medical technologies is expected to grow, while flexible services such as a traveling doctor, dentist, library and grocery delivery around depopulated rural areas to serve ageing populations are also on the increase. In urban areas, there are several apartment blocks that offering a “watching” service for people over a certain age, keeping details of their health ailments in case of emergencies as well as hosting get-togethers and frequent events to prevent isolation. This is particularly important as the shift away from multi-generational households to single-person dwellings in the past forty years has resulted in increased social alienation and fewer options for care for the elderly.

As part of the recognition of the importance of reviving community ties, multi-generational communal houses shared by unrelated people like those found in Germany and the UK have also emerged. But unlike other countries, communal houses in Japan such as Kan Kan Mori seek to invoke and re-interpret the culture’s traditional living arrangements that precede the nuclear family rather than invent a new way of living. We talked to gerontology experts and sociologists to examine how this trend will grow and how Japan’s efforts in keeping its elderly spritely by looking to its past could serve as lessons for other countries.

In the same vein, a number of multi-generation collective houses and sharehouses where childcare duties and household errands are shared by the parents have also emerged and look set to increase in number. One idea that marries multi-generational living with increased employment opportunities for the over-60s is the “Grandma Concierge”, a sharehouse in Yokohama that recreates the warmth and wholesome cooking everyone associates with their grandparents by having a grandma come by three times a week to cook dinner, clean the living room and do the laundry for six twenty-somethings that live in the house. The women who work in the scheme are delighted to be appreciated for domestic tasks that go unthanked and taken for granted at home, while the residents, like overworked singletons everywhere, are grateful to come back home to a home-cooked dinner and freshly laundered clothes a few times a week.

This is just one of a host of initiatives in Japan that turn the idea of the “old” as a burden on its head, drawing on the wisdom, skills and industriousness of its baby boomers to support the younger generation. There are also projects at a national and regional level that address the other part of Japan’s demographic problem: a falling birth rate, which, along with rural flight, is hollowing out the countryside. Two prominent examples are the towns of Kamikatsu and Kamiyama in Tokushima prefecture: the former created a company called Irodori employing old people to pick and process decorative leaves used in Japanese cuisine, while the latter introduced a “work in residence” program that has brought more young people into the local area.

＜Interviewees＞
Florian Kohlbacher: Professor of marketing in the International Business School Suzhou (IBSS) and head of the aging and society research initiative at Xi’an Jiaotong-Liverpool University (XJTLU)
Yosuke Sakai: Director of Syoue Kensetsu, a real estate and construction company
Junko Iwai: The first employee of “Grandma Concierge”
Mineyuki Kaneyama: Welfare and care worker at Care Work Tsurumaki, Tokyo
Ken Sakamura: Professor of Information Science at the University of Tokyo

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