Abstract
This study aims to explore the activities by older generation which attempts to embrace younger generation into their imagined “community” in order to let them be custodians of “memories of life” of the elderly. The study is based upon the data collected by the two-year-fieldwork conducted in a village, located in a mountainous area in the west side of Kanagawa prefecture in Japan. In the village called “X”, in which the author conducted his fieldwork, ageing and depopulation became drastic in 1990s. The village shares the similar problems with other hilly or mountainous areas such as lack of successors of farming and increasing abandoned lands for farming. Referring to Bauman's sociology of anxiety, the author would argue that ageing, depopulation and individualization cause anxiety of elder residents that they might not have a space for their “memories of life” to be kept in the village where they have lived. An apparent reaction to this anxiety is an attempt to imagine and reconstruct a “community” where the younger residents are assumed to serve as the custodians of their “memories of life.” These activities, which they regard themselves as the coming of a new “community”, however, have to face a problem: the elderly have to create what is durable from what is not durable. The younger residents have no or very little sense of anxiety of the older residents and tend to think that those activities are voluntarily organized for a temporary purpose. For the elderly, however, this situation cannot be acceptable because they are pursuing “involuntary” associtation which is expected to sustain after their death.
