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Abstract 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. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In medieval Japan (ca. 1185-1603), Buddhist practices and concepts contributed substantively to the ways in which old age was defined and understood. The widespread custom of lay ordination at the onset of old age rendered a large proportion of the elderly population Buddhist home-leavers ( shukke). Many medieval literati adopted the persona of the aged Buddhist recluse when composing poetry or essays that touched on Buddhist themes. On the other hand, didactic texts and illustrations used the miseries incumbent on the aged body as a means of leading auditors and readers to an appreciation of Buddhist truth. Buddhist legends utilized the figure of the mysterious, enigmatic old man ( okina) as a stand-in for local gods or as avatars of buddhas or bodhisattvas. The aged female body, however, was most often employed to represent demonic beings. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]