Abstract
While health promotion had many meanings in Japanese governmental policy, its polysemy seems to result in the negative health described by Downie, and health promotion in public health seems to be put into his one-dimensional model. In the model, the elderly are to go backward to ill health at the negative end of the dimension after directional efforts for positive health become unrealistic. Downie’s two-dimensional model enables the elderly to promote their health. Nojiri, who redefined the two-dimension model, argues that the elderly should shift their direction of promotion from the functional health axis to well-being after they reach a particular age. There is a rapid increase of the old old, which leads to the emergence of people who are not independent or cannot maintain their productivity. In order to consider how to promote their health, the ninth stage of Erikson’s life cycle was examined. Erikson delineated the old old as those who are vulnerable but who are integrating their diminished and diminishing competencies and still going forward even if they can no longer reach their complete goals. They are in conflict between positive health and negative health as are health promoters.
