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Paper short abstract

　This paper examines disability perception among Japanese farmers using a multi-layered model. It focuses on how interpersonal, practical, and structural layers coexist and shift over time, and how social support helps sustain positive change.

Paper long abstract

　This paper examines disability perception among Japanese farmers employing people with mental disabilities through a multi-layered analytical model. Rather than treating disability perception as a single attitude that emerges and deepens over time, the study conceptualizes it as a configuration of three perceptual layers that coexist throughout the process: interpersonal understanding, practical accommodation, and structural understanding. Transformation is defined not as the appearance of new layers, but as shifts in their relative prominence and interrelation.

　Drawing on qualitative interviews with farmers engaged in agri-welfare collaboration in rural Japan—including crop farming, dairy farming, forestry-related work, and agricultural organizations—this study adopts a narrative and process-oriented approach. Interpersonal understanding refers to how farmers emotionally and relationally interpret people with mental disabilities, including distance, anxiety, trust, and familiarity. Practical accommodation concerns everyday work practices such as task adjustment, role-sharing, and coordination developed through shared agricultural labor. Structural understanding involves recognizing disability as shaped by organizational arrangements, work environments, and community contexts rather than individual deficits.

　The analysis shows that these three layers are present both at the initial stage of employment and in later phases. In the early stage, practical and structural considerations—such as concerns about work pace, safety, and responsibility—tend to dominate, while interpersonal understanding remains limited. Through daily shared work, practical accommodation often moves to the foreground, enabling farmers to reassess assumptions about ability through concrete experience. Over time, interpersonal understanding becomes more relationally grounded, and structural understanding may be articulated more explicitly as farmers reflect on conditions needed to sustain cooperation.

　Importantly, positive transformations in the configuration of perceptual layers are not irreversible. Even when interpersonal understanding and practical accommodation become more prominent, such configurations may become unstable under changing work conditions or increased workload. This indicates that sustaining positive transformation cannot rely solely on individual ethics. Organizational and community-level structures—such as shared reflection, collective responsibility, and connections to external support—play a crucial role in stabilizing these configurations.

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Paper short abstract

Through the narratives of the Filipino women care workers, I have argued in this study that transnational end-of-life care work organizes intimacy through kin-like relations, creating moral spaces within which Filipino care workers exercise moral agency and negotiate moral experiences.

Paper long abstract

It is not new for Filipinos to engage in migrant work as the culture of emigration is prevalent (Parrenas, 2015). Many literatures focusing on Filipino women in transnational care and their families has been published. However, studies on the role of Filipino women in transnational end-of-life care in Japan remain unexplored. This study aims to explore how end-of-life care encounters between caregivers and their care recipients transform notions of end-of-life situated in care institutions in Japan through the lens of Filipino women care workers. Moreover, under what circumstances does it allow Filipino female care workers to reframe migration as meaningful moral purposes rather than merely for economic stability and survival? Through the narratives of the Filipino women care workers, I have argued in this study that transnational end-of-life care work organizes intimacy through kin-like relations, creating moral spaces within which Filipino care workers exercise moral agency and negotiate moral experiences despite the structural constraints of intimate labor. The narratives of Filipino women care workers in Japan provide an insight into what caregiving looks like as experienced by both the caregiver and the care receiver. With this, transnational care for the elderly is assumed to be a byproduct of capitalism, where intimacy and emotional labor are commodified. However, humanistic care created in moral spaces through kin-like relations, moral agency, and moral experience is something that capitalism can never touch - one that has no market value and can not be commodified.

Keywords: transnational care, Filipino women care workers, end-of-life care, moral agency, moral experiences

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Paper short abstract

This paper discusses exemplary senior influencers (e.g. Wakamiya Masako) who promote digital activities or are active on SNS. As digital role models, they counter stereotypes of technology-shy seniors and raise the awareness of an inclusive digital society by sharing older internet-users’ views.

Paper long abstract

In recent years, so-called „granfluencers” have gained media attention, representing older adults who have a large followership on social media or are known for their activities with digital technology. Very often, these senior influencers are single-living women, who acquired computer and internet skills upon reaching retirement age. A prominent Japanese example is Wakamiya Masako (born 1935), known as the “world’s oldest programmer” and "ICT evangelist", who has authored numerous advice books and promotes a “happy digital life” (shiawase dejitaru seikatsu). By recounting their own experiences with computers and things digital (so-called technobiographic stories) and promoting enjoyment in the usage of digital technologies and SNS, these women can be seen as role models for a digitally active life, countering the stereotype of technology-shy seniors. I will analyze exemplary senior influencers and show how they can be interpreted as “warm experts”, a term which Maria Bakardjieva (2005) has coined with her study on ordinary internet users in the 1990s. Their mediation works in both directions: translating the technological world for digitally marginalized peers but also translating the world of senior internet-users to developers and decision makers.

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Paper short abstract

The paper proposes an exploration of hito kara (hitori karaoke), a relatively recent manifestation of karaoke-singing in Japan involving individual singing within the context of venues for one. Hito kara is situated with reference to changing leisure practices over karaoke’s fifty year history.

Paper long abstract

It has been fifty years since karaoke-singing first emerged and became popularised in urban and suburban entertainment districts of Western Japan. Although initially confined to the realm of “after hours” (Plath 1964) eating, drinking and socialising, strongly associated with (mostly) male company employees and the sarariman (salaryman) culture of the post-war decades preceding the collapse of the economic bubble, with the development of private, rented by-the-hour karaoke spaces (so-called karaoke boxes or karaoke rooms) in the mid-1980s, karaoke became established more widely across Japanese society, catering to families, women, the elderly and, perhaps most notably, the young (albeit with some initial trepidation about teenage school children gathering together in privately rented, unchaperoned karaoke venues). More recently, the emergence of hito kara (hitori karaoke), wherein individuals sing alone in karaoke venues specially adapted for one (sometimes simultaneously communicating about the experience with friends and associates via social media), seemingly represents a novel articulation of sociality within the context of karaoke singing, potentially reflecting a longer term trajectory away from more richly socially contextualized forms of leisure tinged with feelings of social obligation, towards uses of leisure time which is individually negotiated and relatively more reflective of personal preferences. This paper proposes an initial exploration of this most recent incarnation of karaoke singing, reflecting also on methodological tools and strategies available for undertaking Anthropological/qualitative research in post-covid Japan.