Engaging the future as ethnographic object: Japan’s aging society crisis, ontogenesis and cybernetics

Abstract

The aging society crisis in Japan represents a point of saturation, when the numbers of elderly in-need-of-care exceed the available resources, leading to economic, societal, and national collapse. The aging society crisis is an agent of change, a future potentiality that is inextricably linked with enactments of and approaches to aging, old age, and sociality in present-day Japan. The passing of Japan’s national long-term care insurance in 2000 opened up new possibilities, new ground on which to compare and contrast, to carve out meaning, identity and particularities. I discuss a differentiation currently underway between the ordering of people, things, institutions, and ideas involved in “prevention” versus that of “care”. Topologically, I argue, care and prevention are noticeably distinct orders of being. But, with an analysis of temporality, we discover that prevention is an action motivated by an anticipatory future that effects change in the present, while care is a direct evincing of the feared-for future. Both care and prevention are thus united in a shared becoming that is the aging society crisis. Engaging the future as an ethnographic object presents opportunities for innovative theoretical exploration and development. How do we go about analysing an object that lacks substantial existence, yet displays agency in the present by organizing networks of relations and motivating change? How might we theoretically frame and approach the future? This research analytically explores futurity as a force of change not unlike power, information and action, by applying the theory of ontogenesis and cybernetics.