IKIRU: The Highs and Lows of Life in Japanese Cinema /
/ PECOROSS’ MOTHER AND HER DAYS
ペコロスの母に会いに行く(Pekorosu no haha ni ai ni iku)
2013/113min/Colour/English Subtitles
Distributor: Spirits Project
Image: © ”Pecoross’ Mother and Her Days” Production Committee
Director: Azuma Morisaki (森崎東)
Starring: Ryo Iwamatsu (岩松了), Harue Akagi (赤木春恵), Ryo Kase (加瀬亮)
Exeter Phoenix screenings:
Wed 2 Mar / Noriben – The Recipe for Fortune / 7.30pm
Wed 9 Mar / Miss Hokusai / 7.30pm
Wed 16 Mar / Pecoross’ Mother and Her Days / 7.30pm
Wed 23 Mar / Tale of a Butcher Shop (with Q&A) / 7.30pm
/ The first dementia summit held in London in 2013 suggested that dementia is now a concern with significant political, economic and social implications for many industrialised ageing countries. Pecoross’ Mother and Her Days confronts this pressing issue with an effect which is both comical and poignant. The film, which was released in November 2013 in Japan, is based on the non-fictional comic book with the same title, by Yuichi Okano, based on his experience of caring for Mitsue, his mother who has dementia. Published in 2012, the book quickly gained popularity and had sold 160,000 copies by June 2013. The popularity of the book, however, cannot be accounted for by its comical quality and the topical subject matter it addresses alone. Firmly embedded in the contexts of post-war Japan and Nagasaki, the lives of the characters depicted and remembered in Okano’s work stir nostalgia and reflection in Japanese readers, merging personal and collective memories of the recent decades.
The popularity of Pecoross’ Mother and Her Days in part reflects the rising interest in dementia in Japan, where it is linked to an acute sense of the crisis of care. Government data published in 2014 estimates that in Japan by 2025 ‘one in every five persons will be 75 or older’ with the number of people with dementia increasing from 2.8 million to 4.7 million.[i] With the population ageing and the prevalence of dementia, care has become a significant individual and social concern in Japan. As a country which has long faced the pressure of care, Japan is often featured in Western media in a positive light. One article published in The Financial Times in 2014, ‘How Japan Stood Up to Old Age’, introduced several older people in Japan who live active and healthy lives and also others who require care and are well cared for. It describes the country’s long-term care provision as ‘one of the broadest and most generous’ in the world.[ii] This ideal image of ageing and care in Japan, however, does not offer a full picture. In Japan elderly care has traditionally been provided by family members and predominantly, by female relatives. Social and economic changes in the post-war period – women’s social advancement, the declining birthrate, the rapid ageing of the population and the increasing number of nuclear families – brought this tradition of gendered and familial care under pressure, while a degree of stigma remained attached to institutional care. Sawako Ariyoshi’s 1972 novel, The Twilight Years captures this pressure. In this, Akiko, the female protagonist who cares for her father-in-law with dementia while working full-time, is desperate for help, saying ‘what am I to do? Do I have to look after a senile old man whom even a nursing home would reject?’ A social worker responds: ‘There’s really no solution to this problem. It tears many families apart. The wife simply has to cope as courageously as she can’.[iii] Recognising the growing need for social care, the government, in 1989, drew up the ‘Golden Plan’, a 10-year plan for the provision of care and, in 2000, introduced the Long-Term Care Insurance System, funded by both tax and premiums required of everyone over the age of 40. Despite these initiatives, a shortage of social care provision remains. This often causes financial, psychological and physical strains on family carers, a situation commonly described as ‘care-giving hell’ (kaigo jigoku) in Japan, resulting in incidents of neglect, abuse and, in the …
Dates & Venues:
5 – 11 February
ICA, London
6 February – 26 March*
Phoenix, Leicester
8 – 27 February*
Watershed, Bristol
8 February – 21 March*
mac birmingham, Birmingham
12 – 14 February
QUAD, Derby
14 – 29 February*
Showroom Cinema, Sheffield
19 - 24 February*
Aberystwyth Arts Centre, Aberystwyth / 20 – 28 February*
Dundee Contemporary Arts, Dundee
22 – 28 February*
Filmhouse, Edinburgh
25 February – 24 March*
The Brewery Arts Centre, Kendal
2 – 23 March*
Exeter Phoenix, Exeter
18 – 24 March
Broadway, Nottingham
20 – 24 March*
HOME, Manchester
*Screening dates vary
(Continued overleaf…)
… worst cases, homicides of the cared-for by the carers.[iv] Although there is a growing
awareness of the desirability of care practice that attends to the needs and demands of the person with dementia, provision of and accessibility to such care is still severely limited. At the same time, dementia is feared and those with dementia seen as a burden on others, community and society, turning many of the population to preventive measures such as sudoku, special exercise and diet programmes.
The sense of crisis caused by dementia penetrates cultural life in Japan more deeply than in other ageing societies. This is reflected in a broad range of popular texts featuring dementia and care that are produced in the country, from TV health programmes and popular magazine articles devoted to the topic of the prevention of dementia, to memoirs, documentaries and fictional films about those with dementia. There has also been an expanding body of novels that dramatise care-giving, most often for older family members, forming the new genre called the ‘care-giving novel’ (kaigo shosetsu). The above-mentioned The Twilight Years is often considered one of the earliest examples of this genre, while more recent examples include Shuichi Sae’s Koraku [Falling Leaves of Autumn] in 1995 and Norio Mobu’s Kaigo Nyumon [Introduction to Care-Giving] in 2004.
Pecoross’ Mother and Her Days is one example of these cultural texts which respond to the prevailing concern in Japan about dementia and care. It approaches this profound subject matter with rich humour, and suggests important shifts in care practice, offering at the same time a nostalgic vision of post-war Japan. Care depicted in the text reflects both an increasing number of male carers and the greater acceptability of and accessibility to external care in Japan, as the traditional gendered and familial form of care has become less sustainable. The text at the same time invites a re-thinking of the values of family too, through its depiction of care where multiple generations are involved both emotionally and practically. Okano’s text also represents the experience of living with dementia in a detached, yet humorous, way. One example of this is the way in which the film makes a comical drama out of the failed attempt of fraud, as a man, who calls Mitsue, pretends to be her grandson, who actually lives with her, and moreover, her forgetfulness saves her from the fraud.[v] In this way the text demonstrates an openness to forgetting, or even, the acceptance of a state of being that does not conform to the independent, capable and productive human subject idealised in neoliberal, capitalist societies. It envisions an affectionate and imaginative care relationship that privileges the history and the internal reality of the person with dementia and thrives upon shared memories of past times. The reciprocal nature of this care is also captured in the original title of the book in Japanese, Going to See Pecoross’ Mother (Pecoross no haha ni aini iku), which suggests that the author’s experience of care, through imagining and sharing past and present, is a subject of the book as much as Mitsue’s experience of dementia.
The text is therefore both autobiographical and biographical, and this element of the book, together with its comical and humorous approach to the issue of dementia care, seems to have contributed to its popularity. It is possible to see that the author’s often nostalgic recollections – from his childhood in Nagasaki to his young adulthood in Tokyo – and his imagining of Mitsue’s earlier life which includes the traumatic event of the atomic bomb dropped in Nagasaki in 1945, resonate with the sentiments of a nation, which, in the face of the devastating effects of the earthquake in 2011 and the terror of nuclear radiation that followed, questions the values of efficiency, productivity and competition that it has pursued and searches for a different future. As the last scene of the film suggests, with its evocation of an optimistic and slightly sentimentalised image of generational continuity, Pecoross’ Mother and Her Days offers a consoling, if fleeting, vision of future, a vision of society which does care.
Text by Katsura Sako, Associate Professor of English, Keio University
[i]Notes
Ministry of Health, Labour and Welfare (2013) ‘Ministry of Health, Labour and Welfare: Service Guide’, http://www.mhlw.go.jp/english/org/pamphlet/dl/pamphlet-about_mhlw.pdf. (p. 23)
[ii] Pilling, D. (2014) ‘How Japan stood up to old age’, The Financial Times, 17 January, http://www.ft.com/cms/s/2/07d4c8a8-7e45-11e3-b409-00144feabdc0.html#slide0.
[iii] Ariyoshi, S. (1984 [1972]) The Twilight Years, trans. Mildred Tahara, Tokyo and New York: Kodansha International. (First published in Japan as Kokotsu no hito. Tokyo: Shincho sha) (p. 160).
[iv] See Hayashi, M. (2011) ‘The care of older people in Japan: myths and realities of family “care’’’, History and Policy, 3 June, http://www.historyandpolicy.org/policy-papers/papers/the-care-of-older-people-in-japan-myths-and-realities-of-family-care.
[v] This is a type of fraud which has recently become widespread in Japan. In this a swindler randomly calls elderly people, pretending to be their son or grandson, who has been out of touch, claims to be in trouble and asks for money. This fraud has been called ‘ore ore sagi’ (ore is a first-person pronoun used by males and sagi means fraud), as a swindler typically begins by saying ‘It’s me’ with urgency, just as seen in the film.