In Japan, they are eliminating “dementia”

Japan is a country full of welcoming people, deep spirit, advanced technology, and many older people and relatively few children. For twenty years I have visited regularly to seek “Eastern” perspectives on aging.

My most recent trip just before Christmas, was undertaken as a visiting professor at St. Luke’s College of Nursing, the premier nursing educational and research institution in Japan and the home of our intergenerational sister program developed by Tomoko Kamei and her colleagues. I met their almost centenarian leader, Shigeaki Hinohara, who is still trying to reform medical and nursing education while also being a bestselling author on the subject of living well. In addition to being in Tokyo, I visited Omuta City in the south, one of the cities with the largest proportion of persons over 65 years, where I was hosted by Rumiko Otani, a most wonderful social entrepreneur who has developed some of the best intergenerational education and community care programs to “normalize” the lives of persons with dementia.

As a country-wide project, Japan eliminated the word for dementia, “chihou,” and replaced it will a gentler word “ninchisyo.” This apparently simple word change has led to new ways of responding to the changes of brain aging. People with “dementia” are thought of more positively as individuals and as members of community, not outcasts. Japan may also be primed to reinvent so-called Alzheimer’s Disease as well.