Aging in Japan: discussion of Home Sweet Home and Aging in Japan

• Event Date: Friday, February 9, 2007
• Time: 12:00 Noon (CST)
• Location: Knight Auditorium, Spurlock Museum, 600 S. Gregory St., Urbana, IL
• Cost: Free Admission

• Talk

Center for East Asian and Pacific Studies

Kuriyama Tomio
Film Director

Susan Long
John Carroll University

This discussion goes with the Center's film screening of Home Sweet Home on February 8, 2007 at 7 p.m. The screening takes place in room 101 of the Armory Building and is free and open to the public.

Born in 1941, Kuriyama Tomio entered the Shochiku Company in 1965. His writing credits include Torajiro's Spring Dream, the 1979 installment of Yamada Yoji's popular Tora-san comedies. After apprenticing as writer and assistant director, Kuriyama began directing films for Shochiku in 1983. He has directed comedies and samurai films but is best known for his Tsuribaka (Free and Easy) series, about a pair of fishing buddies and their adventures. Deeply humane, Kuriyama's recent films concern the dilemmas of aging. Home Sweet Home (2001) concerns a family caring for their mildly senile grandfather. In exasperation, they abandon him in front of a nursing home. When, wracked by guilt, they rush back to retrieve him, they find to their surprise that he has begun a new life. Closer to Home (2003), the sequel to Home Sweet Home, which Kuriyama produced independently, concerns Hidekiyo, a salaryman who, despite having recently been named a member of the board of a prestigious trading company, is forced by his father's worsening dementia to quit his job and return to his hometown in order to care for him. For his portrayal of the old man, Zaitsu Ichiro won the Best Actor Award at the 2003 Vladivostok Film Festival.

Susan Orpett Long specializes in anthropology and East Asian Studies. She did her undergraduate work at the University of Michigan and received her MA and PhD in anthropology at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. She became interested in Japan when she was sent there as an AFS exchange student in high school, knowing little more than how to count to ten and say "sayonara." The intensive experience of a year in such a historically rich culture stimulated her interest in anthropology and encouraged her to continue her study of Japanese language and society. Dr. Long has been actively conducting research on Japanese women, family, care of the elderly, medical systems, and bioethics and end-of-life decision-making. Her most recent publication is Final Days: Japanese Culture and Choice at the End of Life. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2005.

Museum visitors are reminded that food and drinks are not allowed in the Museum. Backpacks and other large items brought to the Museum will have to be stored; there is limited locker storage space available for these items.