Demographic Change and the Family in Japan's Aging Society

SUNY Series in Japan in Transition

by John W. Traphagan (Editor)

Incorporating qualitative and quantitative data and research methods from both demography and social anthropology, this book explores demographic trends in contemporary Japan's rapidly aging society. The contributors describe and analyze trends by addressing the ways in which demographic change is experienced in the context of family. The book considers the social effects, welfare issues, and private and public responses to demographic change and how this change has influenced the experiences of family caregivers and the elderly themselves. It offers both a specific regional contribution to the emerging field of demographic anthropology and an anthropological contribution to cross-disciplinary research on aging.

288 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 2003

About the author

Also writes as J.W. Traphagan

I am an anthropologist and professor emeritus in Human Dimensions of Organizations at the University of Texas at Austin. I received my Ph.D. from the University of Pittsburgh in anthropology, hold an MAR degree in ethics from Yale Divinity School, and a BA in political science from the University of Massachusetts at Lowell. My postdoctoral research was conducted as a National Institute on Aging Postdoctoral Fellow at the Population Studies Center of the University of Michigan. I was also a Fulbright scholar to Japan in the 1990s.

Having become bored with traditional academic writing I recently started using my experience as an anthropologist to write for a general audience. The first example of this is my new anthropological memoir, Embracing Uncertainty: Future Jazz, That 13th Century Buddhist Monk, and the Invention of Cultures. Later in 2021, my first ethnographic mystery novel, The Blood of Gutoku, will be published.