Middle-Aged Japanese Women and the Meanings of the Menopausal Transition (Aging, Change, Development).

Changing meanings of female aging in Japan are interpreted through the ideas used to explain menopausal distress. The research is an analysis of attitude questionnaires and free-flowing interviews with women, men and doctors in a northeastern provincial city and in a check-up clinic in Tokyo. In Japan, the biomedical definition of menopausal distress includes social and psychological causes, as well as hormonal causes. Women and doctors interpret numerous symptoms that occur through their forties and fifties as 'problems of the menopausal years'. Women often use menopausal symptoms to represent their personal dissatisfactions. Men and doctors use menopausal symptoms to support their images of some middle-aged women as overly dependent and 'even psychologically unstable'. In writings and conversation, the menopausal sufferer is perceived as giving into her inherent 'personality' and 'body-type' and having diminished control over her ki ('will'). Her symptoms do not evoke the indulgence usually linked with the care of the sick person in Japan. Biomedical language such as 'autonomic nervous disorder' and 'non-specific complaints' characterize the middle-aged woman's symptoms as psychosomatic and the result of the woman's self-indulgent life style. In parts of pre-war Japan, menopausal distress was called the 'path of blood', a phrase which linked the woman's symptoms with the hardships of work and childbirth endured to gain a place in her husb and 's household. In the currently used phrase 'problems of the menopausal years', the menopausal transition is elaborated into a 'stage' in the life cycle when a woman's intense mothering role has diminished. In this period, women re-asses the worth of their lives and attempt to find meaningful activities as individuals. Highly educated urban women are rejecting the label of menopausal distress for their symptoms, and calling them 'aging phenomena' or 'neuroses'. The middle-aged women who overcome their menopausal problems through hobbies, part-time work and friendships, represent the beginning of a new view of the adult self who finds her 'worth' in individual-centered activities outside of the household.PhDCultural anthropologyUniversity of Michiganhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/160213/1/8422321.pd