2019 Volume 11 Issue 1 Pages 1_32-1_40
Purpose
The purpose of this study was to clarify pride and important things in cultures of Okinawa via stories of the elderly people who are first-generation Japanese-Bolivian from Okinawa, and to gain hints for construction of community-based integrated care- system considered cultures of the colony, Bolivia.
Methods
We conducted interviews with 102 research participants by use of semi-structured servey questionnaires and extracted a series of context talked about their pride and important things in the cultures as the original via verbatim reports, then categorized them.
Results
The participants had “pride in opening up a new field” with “nostalgia for home”. They valued the culture of mutual aid via “YUIMARU blended in daily life” (YUIMARU, a word from Okinawa dialect, refers to mutual assistance) and received energy, friendship from “empathic Okinawa dialect” based on “ties of family, relative strengthening a sense of belonging” in the enviornment which they could feel “pleasure and ease among friends from the same home-town”.
They treasured such as “Honen-sai”(a harvest festival) as “traditional performance art everyone can enjoy and dance together” and inherited ancestor worship, events related to the lunar calender as “traditional events passed down continuously”. They were impressed at “deference to elders” of the next(second and third) generations and proud of living with “a mind to pass down traditions” to them.
Discussion
As the future direction of the community-based integrated care system, it is necessary to promote the system after considering the cultures, the state of healthcare, welfare in Bolivia and understanding YUIMARU, the cultures of Okinawa taken root in the older first-generation immigrants as advantages.
