The purpose of this paper is to examine the meaning of 'staying-put' for elderly people in an economically depressed community, focusing upon their emotional attachment to home place as well as their life strategy.
The study area, Kamioka Town in Gifu Prefecture, which was once a prosperous mining town in Japan, is now facing severe depopulation and rapid aging with the closure of its mines. Most of the elderly in this town often receive substantial pensions compared to retired farmers and live independently from their children. In addition, it is physically not easy for the elderly to "stay put" because of the heavy snowfall in winter. All of these conditions seem to encourage them to migrate out of the town. This article, based on in-depth interviews with twenty-nine elderly people, tries to examine the reasons why they do not leave Kamioka Town in spite of such conditions. In a sense, the studied area can be regarded as a forerunner of the aging community in the metropolitan suburbs of Japan, and the study will identify significant policy implications.
In studying meanings of 'staying-put' for the elderly, we rely upon the concept "insideness with place" proposed by Rowles (1986). Based on his study of the elderly in a declining Appalachian community living away from their children, he argues that three types of insideness, "physical insideness", "social insideness", and "autobiographical insideness", can develop close bonds between the elderly and their places, which encourages them to stay in familiar places and thus reinforces inertia. Although the circumstances around the elderly are quite different between Appalachia and Kamioka, they have a lot in common in terms of attachment to place.
The results can be summarized as follows:
Because the CBD of Kamioka is small and the physical structure of the area has remained relatively stable, it is easy for the elderly to maintain their "physical insideness", a 'body awareness' of and physical intimacy with the environment, which has been acquired through everyday life for a long time. With this "physical insideness", the elderly experience no problems when they go out and find no impediment to living independently in spite of their lowering physical abilities.
"Physical insideness" is reinforced by "social insideness", which is developed from being deeply integrated into a "society of the old". Most of the informants had grown up in Kamioka or at least had lived in Kamioka for many years since they were married. When they were young, Kamioka provided good job opportunities for them, compared with the younger generation, because at that time mining was the key leading industry in this area. Therefore, they could maintain a fairly tight social network. This network can be seen as the "society of the old" for them, and promotes a supportive attitude through a shared sense of value. By participating in the "society of the old", the elderly in Kamioka can develop and maintain their "social insideness".
In addition to "physical insideness" and "social insideness", many elderly people in Kamioka have also developed 'autobiographical insideness'. Their life-long experiences in Kamioka often strengthen the close relationship between the lived experience of the elderly and the places they used to visit.
All these three types of insideness intensify the feeling of belonging to places, which would discourage the elderly from moving out of Kamioka. When elderly people experience all three types of insideness, they are more likely to "stay put" in Kamioka than move out.
In a concluding remark, some implications for service provision policies are drawn out. First, it seems quite relevant to use the 'insideness' concept in order to reduce the number of bedridden people and the amount of service needs.

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