Living in a country that has gone through major changes within half a century, those who were born before 1949 have witnessed China suffering from decades of warfare, struggling through socialist construction, and exploring a Chinese-style market economy. Given the radical changes, the various ways the aged reconstruct how they have lived their past caught my attention as a clue to understanding the immense diversity among the aged. Among my informants, some live as if nothing has bothered them, and those to whom there was nothing left to keep them going, suggesting that there is more to the life of the aged than physical weakness, social isolation, and financial insecurity dictate. How they talk about the past will affect how they perceive their current lives, what they value, and what they truly want from families and society.

A hint in capturing diversity is the third tenet of human security, "people are the most active participants in determining their well-being" (Human Security Commission, 2003). The purpose of the essay is to evaluate the life of the aged in China, calling attention to the aging Chinese from their life course, a perspective that captures the aged as the reconstructed past full of threats and disappointment, and challenges and rewards. I would like to show how the elderly interprets or reconstruct their past and present experiences selectively in various ways to further show that they cannot be lumped together as physically weak, isolated, or have no future.

In this study, the author performed a chronological analysis of the content of reports from two leading newspapers in Japan regarding reputational damage related to the Great East Japan Earthquake and the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant accident. Newspaper databases were searched for Japanese words related to reputational damage, including 風評被害 (reputational damage), 震災風評 (earthquake reputation), and 原発風評 (nuclear power plant reputation). The study author read all of the material extracted by the search, which included 1478 articles from the national and regional editions of the Asahi Shimbun and 1472 articles from the national and regional editions of Yomiuri Shimbun published from March 11, 2011 to December 31, 2020. In total, 2950 articles were analyzed. Debris disposal was the most frequently reported reputational damage topic related to the Great East Japan Earthquake and the Fukushima nuclear disaster; this content topic was followed by compensation, beef, and rice, in order of frequency. The content topics ranking fifth through tenth in frequency were vegetables, special local products of Fukushima and other Prefectures in Tohoku, peaches, hotels and inns, fish and shellfish, and decreased tourism. Examining this breakdown by category, agriculture (21.3%) and tourism (21.2%) were by far the largest categories, accounting for 42.5% of the relevant articles about reputational damage related to the Great East Japan Earthquake and the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant disaster.