Paper short abstract:

Drawing on a twelve-year participant observation in a Korean day care facility in Nagoya and in-depth interviews with the facility users and caregivers, this paper explores how this facility was established, adjusts to Korean culture, and helps elderly Koreans reaffirm their ethnic identity.

Paper long abstract:

While population aging in general is increasingly considered a serious social problem that requires multiple issues to address it, ethnic minority aging is an even more complex issue, which has not so far been given sufficient attention. This applies especially to elderly members of minority groups in Japan, where this is a comparatively new problem. The first generation of ethnic Koreans and some members of the second generation have already entered this age category. Until 2000, they had limited access to social welfare, putting some of them at risk. However, after a long-term care insurance system was established in Japan that year, ethnic Koreans and all other ethnic minority members obtained access to caregiving. This allowed second-generation Koreans to establish day care facilities for the generation of their parents in Osaka, Nagoya and other cities. Drawing on a twelve-year participant observation in such a day care facility in Nagoya and in-depth interviews with the facility users and caregivers, this paper explores how this facility was established as a form of ethnic business, how it provides care-giving services, adjusts to Korean culture, and helps elderly Koreans reaffirm their ethnic identity, which many of them had masked throughout their lives. The paper emphasizes that these new ethnic-minority spaces also provided opportunities for the older-generation users to transmit their memories to younger-generation caregivers. In this sense, such minority day care facilities could be considered sites for the construction of collective memory among this ethnic group and the strengthening of inter-generational ties.