Tanizaki Junichiro’s Futen Rojin Nikki: Medicalization of Aging Body in the early 1960s Japanese Family

Pu, Yujie

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https://hdl.handle.net/2142/102981 Copy

Description

Title

• Tanizaki Junichiro’s Futen Rojin Nikki: Medicalization of Aging Body in the early 1960s Japanese Family
• 谷崎潤一郎の『瘋癲老人日記』: 1960年代日本の家族における、老化する身体の医療化

Author(s)

Pu, Yujie

Issue Date

2018-03-06

Keyword(s)

• Tanizaki Junichiro
• filial piety
• Westernization
• postwar Japan

Abstract

This paper examines the relationship among medicine, family, and elderly in the postwar Japan by looking at Tanizaki Junichiro’s Futen Rojin Nikki (Diary of an Old Mad Man, 1961). Futen Rojin Nikki tells an old man’s experiences of receiving nursing care rather than filial care when living in a stem family. Western medicine was embedded in his everyday life through nursing care. This paper aims to answer why an old man’s body was medicalized in the early 1960s Japanese family. I argue that medicalization of aging body provided a solution for the confrontation between the elderly’s expectation of filial care and the young generation’s transformation in the postwar Japan. The confrontation was against the disparity between the revised Civil Code and its enforcement. On the one hand, the elderly’s expectation was from their insisting on the ie household system and first-son inheritance. On the other hand, along with the tide of industrialization and Westernization in the postwar Japan, the young generation put achieving individual happiness in the first place rather than obeying a traditional family system.

Type of Resource

text

Language

eng

Permalink

http://hdl.handle.net/2142/102981

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