Refuge of the Honored

Social Organization in a Japanese Retirement Community

Yasuhito Kinoshita, Christie W. Kiefer

• Publisher: University of California Press
• Year: 2023
• Print ISBN:
  9780520075955
• Edition: 1
• eBook ISBN:
  9780520911789
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Cultural & Social Anthropology
• Index: Social Sciences

Faced with the decline of the traditional family and the explosive growth of the over-65 population, the Japanese are looking for new ways to care for their elders. This timely study documents the birth of a major social phenomenon in Japan—the planned retirement community.

In the mid-1980s, Yasuhito Kinoshita spent a year living in Japan's first such community, Fuji-no-Sato. His collaboration with Christie W. Kiefer, a cultural gerontologist, is the first detailed study of a retirement community in a non-Western culture.

Fuji-no-Sato is a social community with no visible traditions. Kinoshita and Kiefer show that its residents' preference for long-established relationships creates the need for the invention of relationships that have no precedent in Japanese society.

This book reveals much about Japanese culture, and about the "graying of society" that plagues the newly industrialized countries of Asia. Its lessons about sensitivity to the elderly's values and the need for clear communication have important applications in other cultures as well.


Faced with the decline of the traditional family and the explosive growth of the over-65 population, the Japanese are looking for new ways to care for their elders. This timely study documents the birth of a major social phenomenon in Japan—the planned re

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Tables and Figures
• Preface
• 1 Introduction
• 2 The Scholarly Context of the Study
• PART I AGING IN JAPAN: AN OVERVIEW
• 3 Demography and Income
• 4 Consequences of Social Change
• 5 Welfare Homes for the Aged and Emerging Retirement Communities
• PART II FUJI-NO-SATO
• 6 The Setting and the System
• 7 The Residents
• PART III SOCIAL INTEGRATION
• 8 Management and Residents: Communication Failure
• 9 The Residents Association
• 10 Group and Individual Activities
• 11 Patterns of Social Interaction
• 12 Conclusions
• Bibliography
• Index