Key Norms

Close observation of the regularities of social interaction at Fuji-no-Sato revealed a number of widely shared but unstated, and perhaps often unconscious, rules about appropriate behavior, which we can call norms . Norms are the evaluative standards against which behavior is judged. Although they are often implicit and must be inductively derived from the observation of behavior itself, they can

often be stated explicitly by the more self-conscious and articulate members of society, and they are necessary for learning patterned social behavior. Rosow says: "The sheer presence of norms is a necessary but not sufficient condition of effective socialization. While there can be little socialization without norms, the converse does not inevitably follow—that the existence of norms assures effective socialization" (Rosow, 1974:71, original emphasis). In a similar vein, we are claiming that norms are necessary but not sufficient for regulating and structuring, or patterning, social interaction.

In Chapter 2, we examined Rosow's contention that age-homogeneous communities in America often provide opportunities for elderly residents to develop norms peculiar to their own neigh borhoods and to develop positive self-images and strong interpersonal relationships on the basis of these new norms. We mentioned that this might not work well in Japan because of the division of norms into first- and second-level types and the importance of age grading and other forms of social hierarchy in the role sets generated by these norms. In America, then, the isolation of a class- and culture-homogeneous group of elderly from other groups—particularly younger age groups—actually fosters the development of new roles and the socialization of residents to the performance of these roles. In Japan, homogeneity may have the opposite effect: The absence of younger generations in the community may prevent the socialization of the aged to normal (which is to say, familial) roles and may fail to provide the social distinctions (age, prestige, etc.) out of which normal relations, which are typically hierarchical, and their supporting norms can grow.

At Fuji-no-Sato, this situation was compounded by the newness of the neighborhood. Lacking traditional institutions like businesses, churches, families, and self-government, the community offered few traditional roles, or role-norms, upon which social relations could be based. But this does not mean Fuji-no-Sato was normless. There are many general norms available in Japanese culture from which people can and do choose in constructing a sensible social life. The residents had modified and enlarged this hypothetical list to produce the orderly interactions we saw in the community. Of the many operant norms at Fuji-no-Sato, we have chosen three that seem particularly useful in understanding the

quality of life there, recognizing that this list is by no means exhaustive.

"Don't Cause Trouble (Meiwaku) to Others"

By far the most important norm at Fuji-no-Sato was the need to avoid imposing on others' comfort and freedom. This was usually expressed as the avoidance of "causing meiwaku "—a concept that is difficult to translate but overlaps the ideas of "trouble," "annoyance," "bother," "nuisance," and "inconvenience." This idea is probably familiar in all cultures in one form or another, but it had acquired special significance at Fuji-no-Sato, to the extent that it seemed to color almost every act of at least some of the residents.

The Japanese tend to use meiwaku as a gauge of the closeness of relationships. The closer or more intimate two people are, the more they can expect of each other, and thus the less likely a given act is to be classified as meiwaku . Put otherwise, a given request may cause meiwaku if asked of someone at the outer edge of level two, but not of someone in level one. The objective magnitude of the request is of course also relevant, so there are some things one cannot ask even a relative to do.

In general, though, the concern over causing meiwaku is characteristic of second-level relationships. Where one cannot expect a high tolerance for dependency, yet where there is enough of a relationship that the other would have difficulty simply refusing a favor, one must strive to assess accurately the amount of meiwaku in a request before making it. If there is danger one has exceeded the limit, one is likely to add to the request meiwaku o kakete, sumimasen (I'm sorry I'm causing you [this] trouble). Conversely, one should not be over concerned with causing meiwaku to intimates for fear of being accused of overformal (mizu-kusai ) behavior.

Those familiar with Takeo Doi's writings on dependency in Japan will notice that there is great overlap between indulgence in amae (dependency behavior) and in causing meiwaku when the meiwaku is a request for self-gratification. In this case, meiwaku o kakete sumimasen is almost synonymous with gokoi ni amae sasete itadakimasu (I will indulge myself in your kindness). There are strict limits on the range of situations in which one may get away with a mere apology of this kind.

The central significance of the meiwaku norm at Fuji-no-Sato can be explained on the basis of the unusual role of dependency in the residents' life-styles. Briefly, most of these people seemed to have been unusually independent throughout their lives, the decision to come to this community was itself a statement of this independence, and the maintenance of an appearance of self-sufficiency was crucial to residents' self-esteem. We examine this analysis beginning with two examples.

First, as we mentioned in Chapter 7, many residents answered the question about their motives for moving to Fuji-no-Sato by saying, "In order not to cause meiwaku to our children (daughters-in-law, siblings, etc.)." The degree of apparent meiwaku avoided in this way varied according to the family situation, so some residents could have elected the traditional three-generation living arrangement (still a widely accepted level of meiwaku ), but others would have had to depend on other kin (less acceptable). In any case, the residents' ability to choose a low-meiwaku alternative, living at Fuji-no-Sato, apparently gave them a profound sense of control over their own fate.

Second, one of the hobby groups was studying yokyoku —traditional songs accompanied by the shamisen . When one of the group reported that her neighbor had complained about the noise of her home practice, the entire group immediately voted to give up home practice altogether in order to avoid possible widespread meiwaku . They did not ask their own neighbors how they felt about the practicing or suggest that practicing could be done carefully. The report of the single member engendered the assumption that all their neighbors may have been enduring unacceptable meiwaku and that this was a chance the students dared not take. This was, in effect, a kind of self-meiwaku because the group had access to the community center only one day a week, and their homes were the only other place they could practice. Their behavior, though, was typical here.

This analysis seems to fly in the face of the American belief that Japan is a society that encourages dependency, especially in the aged; but we are not really suggesting that dependency in general was mistrusted by our residents. Rather, Americans tend automatically to link particular kinds of behavior with particular moral attitudes; and when they do not find a particular behavior associated with the expected valuation, they assume they have found a reversal

of the Western set. As Margaret Clark (1969) puts it, in studying other cultures, we must conceptually separate dependent behavior and the evaluation attached to it.

Japanese values are not a mirror image of American with regard to dependency. The Japanese elderly are not mysteriously permitted the very things American elderly are denied. True, there are forms of interdependency accepted in Japan that are rejected in America, but this does not mean the Japanese elderly enjoy a blissful irresponsibility vis-à-vis their children. Meiwaku upon children is better avoided if possible, just as is meiwaku upon anyone else. Dependency is more easily accepted when it is inevitable, not when it clearly can be avoided.

Consider the famous group centeredness of the Japanese in this context. The quality of interpersonal relationships has an unusually high priority in their value system, but this quality depends on mutual concern. The fact that one realistically can depend on one's children when necessary does not change the importance of one's concern for their well-being. As an objective measure of this, we offer three statistics: (1) About the same percentage of Japanese (44 percent) and Americans (42 percent) over sixty say they need to work for money. (2) Of the Japanese elderly, 39 percent, versus 24 percent of the Americans, work. (3) Although only 14 percent of working older Americans say they feel obligated to work, 38 percent of working Japanese elderly say this (Prime Minister's Office, 1982:117-119).

Given these observations about the structure of dependency in Japan, our analysis of the meiwaku norm makes sense. The fact that the residents at Fuji-no-Sato were able to live largely without first-level relationships shows that they had achieved a remarkable degree of independence for people their age. This achievement was not motivated, as it might be in the West, by a high priority on independence itself—mutual interdependence is still a yardstick of value in interpersonal relations—but because it allowed them to avoid causing meiwaku . This value was purchased at considerable cost to themselves, and it would simply be inconsistent for them to tolerate high levels of mutual expectation—high tolerance for meiwaku , if you will—in their new community.

Whether this preference for self-sufficiency grew out of innate character traits or was imposed by circumstances is difficult to say for most residents, but we believe it was the latter for the childless

and those who had never married, especially women. Given that a family life, centered on raising children, is the prototype of intimacy among the Japanese, the absence of it from one's experience probably results in the development of habits of autonomy. Granted, there were individuals at Fuji-no-Sato whose past lives reflected more normative patterns of dependency, but the prevalence of self-sufficient types among the residents was enough to produce this extreme emphasis on the collective ethic of "no meiwaku ."

"Exchange Respect"

The exchange of traditional forms of respect is another nearly universal Japanese norm that acquired special meaning at Fuji-no-Sato. One such form is the simple greeting, usually a bow and a few polite words. Greeting is especially important for older people in Japan, and it generally signifies that the greeter recognizes the identity of the other. Strangers are rarely greeted in casual situations.

The Fuji-no-Sato norm, which specified that every resident should always greet every other at each encounter, resulted in mutual verification of community membership. To the extent that Fuji-no-Sato was seen as a physical territory, this mutual greeting, which usually excluded visiting strangers, amounted to recognition of territorial boundaries. If a resident was not sure if someone was a resident, he or she gave the minimal greeting given to the most distant acquaintance: a short, silent bow.

This function of the greeting was especially clear when the norm was violated. The accusation, "She doesn't even return a greeting," was one of the harshest criticisms residents made of each other. Such a breach implied that the nongreeter did not want to share in the mutual acknowledgment of community membership. The person whose greeting was not returned experienced this as a stinging humiliation. It was as if the lack of acknowledgment amounted to a rebuttal of a strongly held, or at least strongly expressed, value—that residence itself implies a bond, perhaps tenuous but nonetheless crucial. Once a greeting had gone unreturned, it would never be offered again, and the possibility of a relationship between the two would be lost, apparently forever. The importance of returning greetings was so great that residents who had vision or hearing impairments worried a good deal about accidentally violating the

norm. But their worry soon faded because the community evolved ways of greeting that were too conspicuous to go unnoticed or misunderstood.

The importance of this norm elevated the custom of greeting to a kind of yardstick of personal character among the residents. When they wished to criticize a young person for callowness or a daughter-in-law for a lack of filial feeling, they often metaphorically used the expression "doesn't even return a greeting."

This emphasis on small matters of etiquette is not unique to the Japanese setting. We have noticed it in American retirement communities as well, and it seems related to the relative scarcity of media of exchange that can be used to foster relationships in such settings. In more traditional communities, where people occupy a greater variety of roles, many things not only can be, but must be exchanged in the course of everyday life; and these exchanges build and cement relationships. Money, goods, information, advice, services, in-kind help, honors, thanks, even sex are all in daily circulation in a traditional community. But in a community where everyone's needs are fairly well met by a paternalistic staff and where there are few significant status differences or role specialties among residents, genteel deportment and kind speech are among the few things that can be exchanged. Under these circumstances, even small differences in manners among residents assume great significance, and major breaches of etiquette are disastrous.

This principle, which we might call maximizing the available media of exchange , also applied to other expressions of respect and concern appropriate among socially homogeneous neighbors sharing second-level relationships. Three important examples were attendance at funerals, use of personal names, and preservation of anonymity.

In a traditional Japanese neighborhood, everyone who knows the family of a deceased person usually attends the funeral ceremony, dressed in formal clothes. At Fuji-no-Sato, funerals of residents were usually held at the community center, and they were the best attended unplanned social gatherings in the community. Nearly every resident attended every ceremony, dressed with traditional formality. This custom appeared spontaneously with the first funeral in the community and has continued ever since. An attempt by the director to lower the level of formality by having staff attend funerals in ordinary work clothes with mourning bands was

strongly criticized. Residents also rejected the director's suggestion that they themselves should dress less formally.

The only departure from traditional funeral etiquette had to do with the payment of funeral donations, or koden . This custom in a traditional community has the dual function of helping the bereaved meet funeral expenses and acknowledging long-standing relationships between the families in the community. Ordinarily, the recipient family keeps strict records of how much money is given by whom, and this exact amount (plus an inflation rate adjustment) is returned each time a member of the donor family dies. However, neither the economic nor the ritual function of koden was important at Fuji-no-Sato because the family of the deceased was usually able to pay funeral expenses without difficulty and because longstanding family relationships did not exist among residents. The custom of koden was willingly dropped after the first couple of funerals because it added nothing to the expression of respect; in fact, it could have been interpreted as a detraction—an implication that the deceased was not well-off.

Memorizing and using one another's proper names was another example of maximizing the medium of respect. In traditional Japanese communities, the necessity of learning everyone's name is eased by the custom of using kin terms for both address and reference. Thus, old people are generally called "grandmother" (obaasan ) or "grandfather" (ojiisan ), people of a certain age are called "aunt" or "uncle," younger people are called "older sister" or "older brother," and so on. At Fuji-no-Sato, this was somewhat impractical to start with because everyone would be obaasan or ojiisan . It is also more formal and respectful to use names. As a result, kin terms were never used, either by the residents or by the staff, to refer to residents; names were used instead. It was therefore important to learn the names of as many residents as possible as quickly as possible, ideally until one could recall everyone's name on sight.

This has some peculiar side effects. For one thing, kin terms are age specific, whereas names are not. Using names helps eliminate considerations of age as status markers and thus works as a social leveller. For another thing, substituting personal identity for social role as a term of address may have encouraged psychological individualism and contributed to some of the self-assertive tendencies we have mentioned. Third, it resulted in a loss of age-related iden-

tity among the residents, so they sometimes actually seemed to forget their social identities as elders. On one occasion, when Kinoshita had accompanied an elderly resident to the hospital, she was called by a nurse in the usual way, "Obaasan, obaasan , this way please." Later the resident said, "You know, Kinoshita-san, I was a bit surprised at the hospital today. When I heard the nurse call 'Obaasan, ' at first I didn't know who she meant. The next moment I told myself, 'Why, it's me! I'm an obaasan! ' But I haven't thought of that in some time."

There was another peculiarity of the community that produced a special type of respect behavior: the preservation of anonymity . In a typical Japanese community, the long association between neighbors produces a fund of shared information about many details of one another's life history, but Fuji-no-Sato society not only lacked this fund, it upheld norms that interfered with the sharing of such information.

There were two main reasons for residents' reluctance either to give or to request information about one another's background. First, because everyone's life had been lived outside the community in mutual anonymity, there was no way of verifying what people said about themselves. As a result, there was a lack of trust among residents, either that self-disclosure would be believed and accepted or that it would be given honestly. Some of the early residents apparently tried to establish a prestigious standing at Fuji-no-Sato by giving exaggerated descriptions of the wealth and luxury of their earlier lives. This attempt succeeded at first, but in the long run, it led to a loss of social acceptance among their uniformly high status neighbors, who saw their boastful attitude as somewhat crass and common. In the course of the first couple of years, this evolved into a norm whereby residents tended to withhold information about their former blessings and achievements and even regard an interest in their achievements as a kind of nosiness.

Second, there was a shared assumption that the move to Fuji-no-Sato might have been a second-best alternative for many. As a culturally deviant choice, so they thought, residence itself carried the suggestion that there might have been something slightly shameful about a neighbor's past. Mutual respect demanded that such secrets be carefully avoided in conversation.

"Derss to Impress!"

Although age norms regarding dress and grooming are more rigid in Japan than in the United States, two facts about Fuji-no-Sato led to innovation in this area. First, the age homogeneity of the community removed some of the pressure for conformity to the usual dress norms. There were few young people around to serve as contrasts to the residents' dress styles. Second, the relative homogeneity of social class and life-style eliminated many of the usual means of indicating wealth and social status (such as housing, neighborhood, and occupational cues), thereby shifting status competition to more subtle levels. We have mentioned the key role of gardening in this respect, but dress was equally important.

The residents took great care of their appearance. They wore clothes that were simple but of good quality. They were well groomed, and many women also dyed their hair. On the whole, the women used cosmetics more often and more heavily than other women their age, with the result that one noticed a "youngness" in the self-presentation. They did not look much like typical Japanese elderly.

Two revealing expressions of Japanese dress norms are hade and jimi . Although these terms are used to refer to one's overall format, including personality and life-style, they are often expressed in clothing. Hade is the term used to describe people who are a bit flamboyant—showy, zestful, youthful—perhaps to a fault. Jimi refers to the opposite, one who is a bit too sober, subdued, old for one's age. Younger Japanese women are more careful about avoiding an excess of jimi ; older women shy away from a hade image.

Personal preference in clothes and grooming is generally subordinated to a strong set of norms that regulate one's impression on others. A women over seventy, for example, might feel that her own appearance is a bit too jimi , but will prefer to sacrifice her personal taste to create the desired social image. The norms are strong enough that Japanese who come to the United States for the first time are usually astonished by the appearance of American women, especially older ones, because the brightness of their clothes and the amount of makeup are much too hade by Japanese standards. If an elderly Japanese woman were to groom and dress like many American elderly, her sanity would be questioned.

The combination of age homogeneity and status homogeneity at Fuji-no-Sato led to a relaxation of these norms, so the typical woman resident would usually appear to an outsider too hade for her age, and many seemed to enjoy this freedom. There was a kind of competition to see who could get away with the most hade image. Because a person who went too far became the object of gossip, the range of hade ness was limited. For example, bright pink clothes were not acceptable, but some residents wore a soft, muted pink that appeared a bit hade by outside standards. Women also said that, at Fuji-no-Sato, they could again wear clothes they had discarded five or more years earlier as being too hade for their advancing age.

The residents talked a good deal about the importance of "proper appearance" in public places. This was probably a lifelong habit among these upper-middle-class people, but the freedom and leveling of their situation both strengthened its importance and added to it a flavor of adventure. One woman said, "Jimi clothes sometimes make me depressed. When I'm in a gloomy mood, like on rainy days, I try to wear something a bit hade and a bit more makeup. I don't think I'd have this freedom if I weren't living here."