Living happily into your 80s: It can be done

What an unhappy country this is, ranking a dismal 55th in this year’s World Happiness Report. Why should it be so? Japan is democratic and at peace, its streets are safe, its cities clean, its countryside intermittently (where not ravaged) beautiful, its people well-educated, its economy not as flourishing as it once was but the worst of a generation-long recession seems over and it’s possible again (though not easy) to look ahead with some, however qualified, optimism.

Problems abound, certainly. The population is aging and declining, the birthrate sinking, infrastructure crumbling, rural areas dying, storefronts shuttering, politics torpid, social life gasping for breath in air thinned to virtual nothingness by gadgetry that turns friends into avatars or specters or nothing at all as it may seem to old souls shaped by a very different environment who remember how (they think) it used to be.

But there were problems then too, even at the height of Japan’s postwar pre-virtual prosperity in the 1980s. Were people happier then? Do we ever experience happiness except as something longed for or looked back on? About the ’80s it can be said that 80 percent of Japanese considered themselves middle class, suggesting a measure of contentment scarcely possible today as the gap between rich and poor widens, leaving a small opulence-bedecked minority surging farther and farther ahead of a swelling mass of struggling poor looking enviously or resentfully on.

There was no World Happiness Report in the halcyon days, if such they were. The first one was published under U.N. auspices in 2011. Japan, reeling that year from the shock of earthquake, tsunami and nuclear power plant meltdown, ranked 43rd, low but significantly higher than now. Shouldn’t its happiness level be rising as the horror of that catastrophe recedes slowly into history? There’s no “should” or “shouldn’t” about it. The fact is it’s not.

The Report is published now by the Wellbeing Research Center at England’s Oxford University, in partnership with the polling firm Gallup and the U.N. Sustainable Development Solutions Network. It takes into account per capita GDP, social safety networks, healthy life expectancy, freedom to make life choices and from government interference, “generosity” in the sense of charitable giving and helping others, and the absence of political corruption. Then it polls thousands of each country’s people, asking them to rate their personal happiness on a scale of 0 to 10.

By these standards, the world’s happiest country, for the 8th year in a row, is Finland. Number 2 is Denmark, followed by Iceland, Sweden and the Netherlands. Northern Europe seems peculiarly blessed. Israel in 8th place is a surprise. At war, under constant threat, an international pariah as it devastates Gaza in response to the devastating terrorist attack of October 2023 – what has it got to be happy about?

Mexico in 10th place is another surprise, racked by gang violence and an ongoing “war on drugs” that never seems to end. Likewise El Salvador in 37th place – not enviably high but notably higher than Japan; yet Mexico and El Salvador are two countries bleeding emigrants risking life and freedom for a better life in the U.S. (ranked 24th), in such numbers as to spark the backlash President Donald Trump rode to power and into action against them.

Back to Japan. The monthly magazine PHP (May) devotes a full issue to the theme of “living vigorously and happily into the eighties” and beyond. It’s full of happy people offering happy testimony to how happy life can be and how happily it can be lived – and best of all it’s easy! Happiness is not some distant impossible will-o’-the-wisp, it’s this, here, now, if we can only learn to recognize it for what it is and reach out for it! A few simple rules: physical and mental exercise, naturally; do something new, however trivial, every day; avoid stress (easily? really?); don’t neglect your appearance; think positive; dance, laugh, sing.

Here’s the ultimate in positive thinking: “Dying alone – I’m all for it!” That’s ground-breaking. The prospect is more apt to terrify than thrill; one visualizes what numerous media reports convey all too vividly: elderly people living alone, taking sick, dying unattended, decomposing unnoticed until the smell at last delivers its awful message and professional decontaminators must be called in.

Never mind all that, says in effect, or rather writes in her contribution to PHP’s feature, Michiko Tara, 88 and living alone, a YouTuber with a growing following, having been introduced to the medium by a grandchild, writing about being 88 and living alone – happily. A popular theme, clearly.

We’ll return to her in a moment, pausing first to introduce some remarks by neurologist Takeyuki Nishi. “People seem to think that with age the brain grows old,” he writes. “But the latest research overturns that conventional wisdom.” Very old people with very good brains are not rare exceptions here and there, but numerous enough to justify new and more optimistic thinking. “Super-agers,” he calls them – people like artist Hatsuno Goto, who died in 2017 at age 113, having turned to painting for the first time in her life at 73. She was exhibiting her work and winning awards for it well into her 90s.

If she can do it so can we, maybe. Nishi makes four suggestions. Exercise: walking is good, dancing better. Walking can be done any old way; dancing requires coordination; coordination stimulates and rejuvenates; basketball dribbling is good too, for the same reason.

Do something new every day – anything: walk down a new street, enter a new store, watch a new TV program, sample a new food.

Mind your appearance. Don’t let yourself go. Nishi again cites research. As the body goes, so goes the mind. Those who look their best do their best. Those who do their best have the most positive attitudes. Positive attitudes are life-giving, life-enriching, life-extending. 

Avoid stress. Easily said. “Stress is the great ager.” We’d guess as much even without expert confirmation. These are stressful times. What times aren’t? We must do what we can. For example: “It’s said smoking and drinking increase the risk of dementia, but research shows that the stress resulting from forcing yourself to quit habits you’ve enjoyed for years is more risky still.” Relax. Indulge. In moderation of course, one presumes he would add.

There’s no formula for stress avoidance. One person’s stress is another’s relief. Which is more stressful: living with someone or living alone? For Michiko Tara, the former. When her husband died eight years ago she immediately disposed of his effects and filled their – now her – fourth-floor flat with her own things: pictures, furniture, bric-a-brac. “I’ve always enjoyed spending time by myself,” she writes. Not all her time. A hobby painter, she takes art lessons and handicraft lessons and lessons in local folk singing – for instruction and also for company, in small doses. “To have lots of time I can spend in my own way – that’s happiness. Lonely? Never.”

Her three children all invited her to live with them. And give up the delights of freedom and solitude? What for? Fear of dying alone? “Dying alone is my ideal! – in the home I love, listening to music I like…” The grislier aspects of it don’t seem to have touched her, more power to her for her ability to filter them out. Death is nice, if you paint it that way.

We return to our initial question: Why is Japan so unhappy? PHP at least seems to think happiness is simple enough. Perhaps in focusing exclusively on the elderly it makes it so. It’s relatively easy for the elderly to be happy, given health and a measure of financial security. Retired from the stresses and strains of active life driven by economic necessity that presses ever harder on the shrinking younger generations, the elderly are free to an extent reminiscent, in an odd way, of the freedom of the young generation of the 1960s and ’70s, the rock’n roll generation for whom youth was demographic and spiritual king as today age is.

Let the last word go to actor-comedian Sandayu Dokumamushi, irrepressible as ever at 89. Japan’s trouble, he says, is that it’s forgotten how to laugh. “My mother and father,” he writes, “grew up in the early years of the 20th century – a terrible time; the 1923 Great Kanto Earthquake, the depression, World War Two. No laughing matter – yet in my home we were always laughing. I look back on my mother and father and I never recall them as anything but happy.”

His father, it seems, was a natural comedian. Jokes came readily to him. He had the gift of laughter and spread it generously, in return for which neighbors helped feed the family when poverty beset it. “Laughter is an art, a technique,” writes the son. It is taught, learned, mastered – or it isn’t. Today, he complains, it’s not. People are too self-absorbed, screen-focused; worse yet, masked, even beyond the Covid-19 crisis that masked us.

Have 80 years of peace, 70 years of relative prosperity, 30 years of a technological empowerment beyond anything even our nearest ancestors could have imagined, left us so little to laugh about? It seems so,

Michael Hoffman is the author of “Arimasen.”

© Japan Today