Growing old and the ‘secret Japanese art’ of gratitude

Kavedzija, a professor at Exeter University in England, interviewed elderly Osakans over more than a decade. She has just published Making Meaningful Lives: Tales from an Aging Japan.

Time and again, she found, Osakans in their 70s, 80s and 90s would express gratitude while describing their life stories. “I am grateful (arigatai),” they would say, with a meaningful, thoughtful pause just before using the phrase.

“Many of my interview recordings, I later came to realize, captured the same space of silence before an expression of gratitude,” Dr. Kavedzija writes in the latest edition of the journal Aging & Anthropology.

It’s a racing certainty that in the years ahead those of us in the West are going to be turning Horace Greeley on his head and “looking East, old man.” Japan is the oldest society in the world. Yet somehow it is doing more than a few things right when it comes to caring for the elderly.

(In the past year, for example, Japan has managed to suffer a death rate from COVID that is, so far, a staggering 93% below that of Germany and 96% below that of the United States.)

Where Japan has trod, other countries will follow. The number of over-65s in America has nearly doubled in 20 years. By 2035 we are expected to have more senior citizens than minors, for the first time in history.

Read: Baby boomers face financial distress and age discrimination

In Japan, economists have been worried about the growing number of elderly who are at economic risk from an “increasingly threadbare safety net,” Kavedzija reports. Yet studies have found that many of the elderly there are in better psychological shape than economists might have predicted. Among the reasons: Faith in the future, social connections, and this “attitude of gratitude.” Many of the people she interviewed were reluctant to say they were “satisfied” with life, because it might sound like bragging. Instead they would say “I am grateful.”