Aging bodies, minds and selves: Representations of senile dementia in Japanese film

This paper examines depictions of senility and related forms of age-related decline in Japanese film, literature, and other media, relative to their popular representation in North America. While medicalized concepts of senile dementia, especially Alzheimer's disease (Arutsuhaimā shō), are well known in Japan, symptoms of deterioration among the elderly are still commonly framed as “boke”-a folk-medical category associated more with a loss of social graces than with cognitive decline. Whereas senile dementia has most often been depicted in North America as a condition entailing a horrifying “loss of self,” or even a loss of humanity, responses in Japan point to a different range of concerns. Japanese discourse on senility has commonly expressed anxieties over the difficulties faced by caregivers or the potential for senile elders to engage in socially disruptive behavior, but representations of senility that call into question the selfhood or humanity of the elder are exceedingly rare. I argue that social and cultural factors can help explain why people in Japan might be less inclined to interpret the kinds of changes wrought by dementing diseases in terms of a diminishment of self.