Rites of Passage, Intergenerational Life, and the Communities That Endure In a small hamlet not far from where my boat Wahine is moored in remote Japan, there sits a weathered stone beside a tiny shrine overlooking the bay. It is not especially large, perhaps the size of a basketball. Salt air and countless hands have worn much of its surface smooth over the years. At first glance, it seems ordinary, another object aging alongside the village itself. For generations, however

This week in Tokyo, I had the privilege of spending time with two Haiku masters, Emiko Miyashita and Kyoko Uchimura. We shared dinner, exchanging thoughts on poetry, aging, and life in Japan. The following day I sat in on their workshop during a conference on the Humanities and the Arts organised by the International Academic Forum. Many of the older people I meet in Japan’s longevity hotspots practice haiku, and I wanted to understand more. To many outsiders, haiku can appea

Early in my research into aging in Japan, gerontologist Dr. James McNally wrote me and said something that stopped me in my tracks. He suggested that I may be documenting the last cohort of Japanese super-agers: a generation who benefited from social and cultural conditions that may no longer exist in the same form. That thought has stayed with me ever since. Recently, psychologist Professor Dexter Da Silva, after hearing me share about the “last cohort” idea, wondered aloud