Growing Young

by Marta Zaraska

  Yet as I arrived at the small village of Matsukawa in the Nagano prefecture, this love of vegetables was certainly not apparent. I’m not sure what I was expecting, really. Perhaps roadside stalls selling heads of fresh-from-the farm cabbage and lettuce? Small yet busy markets where locals mill around buying celery stalks, turnips, and enoki mushrooms? I saw nothing of that. Instead there were several big-box stores offering plastic-wrapped vegetables not much different from those at any supermarket in the West. Oh, well. My romantic vision of a veggie-loving countryside shattered, I continued deeper into the village. And there I did see something that gave me an insight into Matsukawa’s longevity secret: commitment to the community.

  From all the Nagano’s mountain villages, I chose to visit the unassuming Matsukawa for a reason: this is the place where men live the longest in the whole of Japan—82.2 years on average, over ten years longer than the male inhabitants of Mississippi. Their longevity formula does include the veggie-loaded diet, but researchers studying the remarkable health of the locals point to two other key factors: social cohesion and the commitment to community.

  I could certainly see this the moment I arrived at a park in the centre of Matsukawa. First of all, the area was spotless. Not a single piece of trash was visible, and nothing was out of place or broken—no spatial stigma risk here for sure. The facilities were impressive and designed for all. There was a playground, a picnic site, outdoor fitness equipment for adults, a public library, a stage for events, a foot-massage path (you take off your shoes and walk over various types of spikes—painful; I’ve tried). The toilets were so sparklingly clean my grandma would have been proud, and she is the Martha Stewart of cleaning. There were even fresh flowers beside the sinks. You could see that this was a place where some very conscientious people truly cared about where they lived. As I strolled around, kindergarten-age children ran alone across the park with no helicopter parents in sight. Two old ladies chatted in the picnic area while another one biked to the library. It was not the picture of communal hustle and bustle you can witness in Latin countries, but everything was orderly and smooth-running. It was an image of a collectivist nation at work.

  Before the second half of the twentieth century, there wasn’t much talk about collectivist or individualistic cultures. But then, in the 1970s, Geert Hofstede, a Dutch employee of IBM who later became a professor of social psychology, came across a large survey database of IBM workers in over fifty countries, containing more than a hundred thousand questionnaires. On a hunch, Hofstede started analyzing the data and discovered it to be an amazing treasure trove of cross-country comparisons. This set him on a long journey of studying contrasts between cultures. Today, Hofstede’s cultural dimensions model is widely used to examine how people across the planet differ in their approach to life.

  One of Hofstede’s dimensions is collectivism-individualism. Citizens of countries that score high on individualism tend to have an “I” mentality, and you hear them talk a lot about things such as privacy, individual rights, and achievement. A large, tightly knit family to depend on is not part of the picture. As De Tocqueville once said, “Such folk owe no man anything and hardly expect anything from anybody.” In a collectivist nation, the focus is on the group—the priority here is harmony and belonging. Loyalty is treasured, and decisions are based on what’s best for everyone. This type of culture is a “we” culture.

  As you may have suspected, the US is a very individualistic nation. In Hofstede’s calculations, it came out as number one in the world with a score of 91 (on a scale of 0 to 100). The UK got 89; Canada, 80; France, 71; Poland, 60; and Japan scored 46, which placed it on the collectivistic end of the spectrum, although still quite far from the most collectivistic country of all, Guatemala—a mere 6. In Guatemala, family is extremely important. Many people live in the same house with their extended family—cousins, aunts, and uncles included—and when they emigrate to the US, they take their relatives with them (among migrants with families apprehended by the US border patrol in the first eight months of 2018, Guatemalans had the largest share of any country).

  Some researchers believe that Japan’s collectivism may have its roots in the way rice is grown. Long-term collaboration is key when you want to succeed with rice: neighbours need to flood and drain their fields more or less in unison, and expensive irrigation systems are required, something that most individual villagers can’t afford. You have to help each other and live in harmony.

  Today, the Japanese proudly talk about their social capital, of which one manifestation is the existence of neighbourhood associations, which the locals call chonaikai or jichikai. The idea is that residents of a neighbourhood work together to make their community a better place, placemaking it—they organize festivals and sporting events, take care of clean-ups, patrol streets against crime, organize excursions for the elderly, hold regular lunch parties, and even exercise together doing rajio taisō—an exercise routine broadcasted early in the morning on the radio.

  Across Japan there are about 300,000 neighbourhood associations—93 percent of locals claim their community has one, and if a neighbourhood association does exist, 94 percent of residents will belong to it. They talk about chien, or having a shared territorial bond, and believe in a “five-house rule” stating that you should keep a close relationship with people in the three houses opposite yours, as well as those who live in the house to your left and the one to your right. That’s why it’s not uncommon to spot a Japanese person cleaning up the sidewalk in front of other people’s properties. Such commitment to community is also what’s behind the next stop on my itinerary: a senior’s club in Matsudo City.

  Smile Muscles and Middle Class Mentality

  The flat suburb of Tokyo, Matsudo, may be easy on the seniors’ knees, but, I hear, gets pretty hot in the summer from all that asphalt everywhere. Matsudo is not Kyoto-pretty, yet it’s ultra-clean and well organized. Plastic bags full of bottle caps hang in front of properties ready for recycling, pots of flowers are free of weeds and the sidewalks are nicely swept (signs of conscientiousness?).

  As I approached a small parking lot, I saw a yellow board pinned to the railing. Glued to it were a few printouts advertising activities at a local senior’s club. Monday: tarot reading and miso cooking. Tuesday: tai chi and flower pressing. Wednesday: more tai chi. Thursday: knitting. Friday: gardening. The club itself is located in a private house that has been adjusted to the needs of the elderly: there are all the requisite ramps as well as a stairlift chair. At the doors, I was greeted by Saitou-san, a cheerful middle-aged woman sporting jeans and a polyester apron, who owns the house and runs the club. I took off my shoes and replaced them with slippers that had been conveniently prepared for the guests, as is the Japanese custom, and followed Saitou-san to the second floor. The room up there smelled of roast pork and vegetables. Eighty-four-year-old Michiko was eating lunch with her friends, all of them elderly. That’s what she came here for, she told me: friendship. “To move those muscles,” she said, pointing to the part of her face that makes her lips lift in a smile. She made me think of that optimistic nun looking forward with “eager joy” to her vows at the School Sisters of Notre Dame.

  After the women finished eating, which they did in relative silence (as is customary in Japan), they cleaned the table and set out to make pressed flower crafts, covering the tablecloth with perfectly dried petals. The conversation picked up, laced with laughter. Michiko told me that she liked making things with her own hands. “It keeps the brain stimulated,” she said. Whether it was the friendships or the hobbies, she sure looked full of life and energy, despite her age.

  Surveys show that just like Michiko, over 60 percent of Japanese seniors participate in some kind of social group activities, with hobby clubs being the most popular. Although these numbers are tricky to compare, in the US, for example, less than 20 percent of older adults attend seniors’ centres on a regular basis. That’s bad news. According to
one study, going to such a centre even once a week lowers the risk of developing dementia by 40 percent. If each and every older adult in Canada picked up one social activity—be it pressing flowers, tai chi, or community gardening—the overall rate of Alzheimer’s disease–related disabilities in the nation would decrease by over 16 percent.

  What’s more, senior Japanese have another advantage over their North American or British counterparts when it comes to longevity-boosting relationships—more of them stay married late into their lives. In Japan, almost 90 percent of men over the age of sixty-five have a wife, versus 73 percent in the UK, 68 percent in Canada, and roughly 70 percent in the US. For women, the rates are 56 percent (Japan) and 45 to 46 percent (UK, US, and Canada alike). There is a bit of a chicken-and-egg thing going on here, of course. Are more Japanese seniors married because their spouses live longer or do they live longer because they are married? The answer is—probably both.

  One thing that kept coming up in my interviews with Japanese researchers, something that usually wasn’t on the table when I talked with their Western colleagues, was the connection between longevity and egalitarianism. This topic often popped up right after the conversation covered the country’s economic wealth and the social participation of seniors. “In Japan everybody has middle class mentality,” regardless of their actual socio-economic class, says Shiro Horiuchi, a Tokyo-born longevity researcher who now works at the City University of New York. During the post-war economic growth in Japan, the income gap between the country’s richest and poorest citizens flattened considerably—so much so that by the 1990s, over 90 percent of the people here considered themselves to be middle class.

  Access to education and health care got levelled up, with obvious benefits to the well-being of the less wealthy. But it’s not just that. The cultural differences and barriers between social classes, so prevalent in the US, are a rare thing in Japan, Horiuchi explained. There is a certain equality in Japan, with people easily interacting together—poor with the rich, underprivileged with powerful. That this boosts longevity and health of people with low socio-economic status is hardly surprising. When you feel your position in the society is strong, that you are important, that you belong, you experience less health-damaging uncertainty and stress. You may be a meagre gardener clipping public greenery, but you feel your role is vital for the greater good—and your greater psychological well-being translates into better physical fitness. One meta-analysis of studies conducted in eleven countries including Japan, Canada, and the US showed that each 0.05 unit increase in the Gini coefficient, a measure of income inequality, means 8 percent higher mortality risk. If the US (Gini index of 0.39) became as egalitarian as Iceland (0.24), Americans could basically give up on eating vegetables and still their longevity might not be any different than it is today.

  What may be less apparent when it comes to the links between longevity and income equality is that living in an egalitarian society benefits the centenarian potential of the rich, too. In egalitarian countries, people trust each other and cooperate more. Those with money don’t have to shut themselves off from the rest in gilded cages. There is no need to live in gated communities (which are a rare sight in Japan), to avoid walking the streets for security reasons, or to shun public transportation. This results in feelings of inclusion, harmony, and lowered anxiety for all. When there is social stratification, social capital erodes. People don’t help each other much. They don’t care about common goods the way the inhabitants of the longevity village, Matsukawa, care about their park with its foot-massage paths and flowers in the public toilets. They also don’t feel inclined to work for the benefit of society long after they hit retirement age.

  Working Till You Drop

  I saw them everywhere across Japan, directing traffic around road construction sites, collecting parking fees, sweeping sidewalks in front of museums, and pruning roses in public parks: silver-hair employees doing their silver-hair jobs. According to governmental statistics, even among the seventy to seventy-four age group, one-third of men still work (and as many as 8 percent of those over eighty-five). They don’t truly retire—they simply change careers to something easier, more relaxing. To find new jobs, they show up at places like the Silver Human Resources Center in Matsudo, one of over 1,300 senior employment agencies across the nation.

  The centre is housed in a nondescript government building—it could be as well a place to get a driver’s license or register a small business: glass doors that swoosh open to let you in, industrial carpeting on the floor silencing your steps, a few potted plants here and there. My attention was drawn to several boards that held pictures of elderly people on the job. There was a woman with a vacuum cleaner in what looked like a school classroom. A man fixing a bicycle. Someone—hard to tell the gender with all the protective gear—pruning a large tree. I was soon met by the director of the centre, an older man who himself might be already past retirement age. He told me they often have retired office workers come in, looking for something to fill up their days. Most people don’t mind going from being high up the corporate ladder to sweeping streets, he told me. They just want something non-demanding that would make them feel useful. It’s about social participation, he said, not money.

  The oldest employee the Matsudo centre had recently matched with a job was already ninety-two—she works as a cleaner. But there are many, many others, some not much younger than her—parking attendants, gardeners, school-crossing patrollers. Work is something that gives structure to their life and roots them in the local community. Retiring, they feel, is losing something: their place in the society, meaning in life, respect. As many as 43 percent of Japanese workers say that retirement is something negative, compared to just 18 percent in the US and Canada. One famed Japanese longevity researcher, Shigeaki Hinohara, used to repeat: don’t ever retire, but if you must, do so a lot later than age sixty-five. He stayed true to his words, working as long as eighteen hours a day until the day he passed away at the ripe age of 105.

  Studies confirm the health benefits of staying busy well after the official retirement age. In one longitudinal survey, those seventy-five-year-olds who worked a paid job over a hundred hours a year in 1998 were more likely to be still alive in 2000, and in better health, than those who quit completely. Working past retirement may also be the reason why people in Nagano live so long—the prefecture boasts the highest employment rate of the elderly in the country. But if you are like me and don’t find the idea of toiling well into your centenarian years all that appealing, rest assured: there is another lesson in here than just simply “work till you drop.” Silver-hair jobs are good for health for several reasons: they encourage physical activity, lifelong learning, and making new friends. Above all, though, they are about ikigai.

  Ikigai is a word you hear a lot in Japan. I hear it when I talk to Michiko as she presses flowers at the senior’s club, from Fujita Masatoshi, the non-retired gardener, and from many other seniors and non-seniors alike. Ikigai does not have a perfect equivalent in English, but is often translated either as “purpose in life” or “life worth living.” Among Japanese people over the age of sixty-five, about 88 percent claim to have ikigai.

  If you are a Westerner, you may be tempted to see ikigai as self-fulfillment, but that’s not exactly it. It’s more about how you help others, contribute to the society—which was evident to me from the way the Japanese people I met talked about ikigai. Yet since the word doesn’t translate easily, there are no studies that directly compare Japan with other nations on ikigai. One study that came close asked people in ten countries to rate such statements as “I am doing something useful for my family or for the world” or “My family or others believe I am able to do something important for them.” Japan scored the highest in terms of the percentage of people who answered “very much” to these claims—27 and 26 percent, respectively. In the US, those numbers were 11 percent for the first question and a mere 8 percent for the second.<
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  Those I talked to in Japan told me that for them ikigai is “making others happy,” “helping others,” “making people laugh,” and “raising children.” No matter what your particular ikigai is, though, research suggests that it improves physical well-being and extends life. In a study that followed over forty thousand Japanese for seven years, among people who had ikigai at day one, only 12 percent rated their health as “poor” later on, compared to 46 percent of those who didn’t have purpose in life. What’s more, those with ikigai were 50 percent less likely to die compared to the rest—an effect similar to quitting smoking and far stronger than that of becoming a gym bunny. No wonder, then, that the Japanese Ministry of Health, Labour, and Welfare has included ikigai in their health promotion strategy.

  Although ikigai is a particularly important part of the Japanese culture that contributes to longevity, other traditions and concepts likely boost the health of the locals, too. I’m talking about things like chado, haiku, shodo, ikebana, and hanami.

  Jumping Frogs and Forgotten Umbrellas

  Clad in a silvery-pink kimono that reminds me of cherry blossoms, Chiaki-san, my hostess at a Kyoto teahouse, wiped porcelain bowls with a delicate silk cloth, then reached for a bamboo ladle to pour hot water into them. All her movements were precise, deliberate yet artful, her hands dancing over the dishes. I was trying to concentrate on the simple beauty of the tea ceremony, to clear my mind, but I wasn’t used to sitting on my legs on tatami mats. Soon, I started to fidget.

  The chado, or tea ceremony, I was participating in was a shortened, one-hour version of a ritual that normally lasts four times as long. It’s supposed to promote inner peace, so talking is discouraged. Every detail counts: the direction in which the bowls face, the placement of the tatami mats, and the position of the calligraphy scroll hanging on the wall. As I watched Chiaki-san mix the powdered green matcha tea with water, the silence broken only by the quick swish-swish-swish of her bamboo whisk, I began to relax, my breathing slowing down. I have to admit: observing the studied movements of the hostess was mesmerizing.