SECURITY, equity, and self-sufficiency, important to the discussion of the public contract, are also central issues for understanding the private contract in both Japan and the United States. Helping arrangements in the private domain consist of the noninstitutional, informal support offered to the elderly by their family and social networks, which usually includes relatives, friends, neighbors, and acquaintances. These networks of private life are complex, because they are based on the dynamics of life cycle transitions, cohabitation, affection, intimacy, and companionship that lie at the heart of these interdependent relationships. We will explore these dynamics of private helping arrangements here and in the following two chapters. In this chapter, we will explore the conditions of helping arrangements in the two communities by examining the junctures of giving and receiving help at the aggregate level. As we will see, the objective conditions of proximity and the subjective conditions of evaluating vulnerability both play an important role in the practices of social support.

THE PRIVATE DISCOURSE: EXPECTATIONS OF VULNERABILITY

Dorothy Turoski is a 74-year-old woman who lives in a public housing complex for the elderly in the city of West Haven, Connecticut, 80 miles to the northeast of metropolitan New York. She packed chicken at the local poultry factory for 28 years before retiring from her job, and now lives in a subsidized one-room housing unit of this complex on a small Social Security income. Dorothy has some difficulty moving around because of arthritis, and she has lived here alone for 7 years.

The subjective perception of vulnerability differs from one society to another according to customs, values, and resource affluence. Tolerance for pain, poverty, and loneliness varies because of different cultural prescriptions, social definitions, and relative sense of deprivation. The degree to which this vulnerability is anticipated as an inevitable process of old age is fundamental to the way societies prepare for – and ultimately deliver – social support for the elderly. In Japan, this anticipation is far more prevalent than in the United States; the assumption that everybody will need help – the preparation for an eventuality rather than a possibility – creates a greater willingness on the part of givers to commit the time, energy, and resources necessary to help, as they themselves stand to benefit from this arrangement in their own later lives.

The perception of help also differs from one society to another according to access and desirability. Cultural assumptions and norms that shape social ties – transcending individual cases of need – produce smaller, focused support networks in Japan. The mutual helping arrangements forged by obligation and affinity are explicit in these small units and have important consequences for the security and independence of the elderly in Japan.

How an individual attains security and independence in old age, however, is not an abstract but a concrete issue that affects the quality of financial, physical, and emotional well-being.

To explain the cross-national differences and similarities outlined in the previous chapters, we will now focus systematically on the cultural and structural conditions that shape the social contracts. Here and in Chapter 8, I synthesize the comparative findings in a conceptual scheme, to identify the regularity of variation in the values and interests that shape these social contracts. In the previous chapters, the main purpose of the comparative analysis has been to illustrate the distinct features of the two cases. The comparative analysis now shifts to Tilly's variation-finding comparison to specify the systematic variation in the cultural assumptions of deservedness and fairness (Chapter 7), and in the structural relationship of the social contract (Chapter 8). The classifications of cultural assumptions and assignments of symbolic resources that I develop in these two chapters are typologies distilled from the comparative empirical analysis that characterize the essence of the helping arrangements. The conceptual scheme classifies the typical characteristics of the two cases, and specifies the principle of variation between them, to account for the differences and similarities of the social contract.

First, in this chapter, I will explore the cultural assumptions underlying the protective and contingency approaches to identify the systematic variation in them, and explain how they inform the social organization of help. These assumptions are grounded in the subjective realities in which people construct the meaning of their behavior, a vision of the world that they take for granted in everyday life; they represent the subjective interpretations of life and human relationships, and the universal experiences of compassion, vulnerability, and sacrifice.

When older people talk about their past, one is immediately struck by the broad range of history they have witnessed in their lifetimes. The elderly provide a special fascination, because their retrospective accounts of the past often point to continuities and changes that lead to the present and also project into the future. In this sense, the elderly are historians, and in some ways they act as the barometer of social change. Their individual responses to change usually encompass a range of feelings and thoughts that relate to satisfaction with their present lives. In this study, the Japanese elderly often noted a sense of progress and social change, referring to new production technologies and household conveniences that have become widely available. The American elderly, in general, tended to express nostalgia for the past, some sense of loss, and a concern that new values represented something of a decline.

This sense of change must be understood within the contexts of the history and the community characteristics of West Haven and Odawara, which this chapter illustrates. The changes that each community has encountered – new job opportunities, residential options, modern life-styles – have influenced the social relations and support networks of the elderly and represent the background in which their helping arrangements are forged.

Modern societies today contend with new population dynamics that have never before existed in their demographic history. As the number of older people grows, these countries must determine how best to organize themselves to provide for the needs of this population, while at the same time fostering the sense of social contract for the society as a whole. The constraints are real: Fiscal and material resources are finite and must be shared in a way that is perceived to be just. In the face of these problems, societies confront the fundamental questions of who gets what, how, and why. To answer these questions, these societies ultimately must appraise the principles underlying the reasons why some people should deserve more help than others.

This study has systematically examined the Japanese and American answers to this fundamental question. It has explored the basic issues of vulnerability, dependency, security, protection, entitlement, and obligation that require direct attention if these societies are to meet the demands of different generations in the forthcoming decades. We have found that support is organized and perceived differently according to different cultural and social conditions; yet in both Japanese and American societies, the key to turning obligation into giving and charity into entitlement is the recognition that support between generations is a legitimate process of intrinsic value. Despite differences in both nations, the solution to the “problem” of old age in the final analysis is the gift of generations symbolized in a logic of fairness.

How are people made deserving of help? How do different cultures define the meaning of giving and worthiness of the people who “ought” to be helped? This book explores these questions by comparing Japanese and American helping arrangements and support systems. Drawing on 2 years of fieldwork, the study analyzes the cultural and structural conditions that shape the “social contract” in the case of the elderly. My analysis draws attention to the symbolic dimension of this social contract and focuses on the importance of cultural assumptions and social assignments that create the conditions of deservedness.

There is more to the phenomenon of giving and deserving help than goodwill and meeting others' needs. People seemingly give help even when it is not in their interest to do so. Reciprocity also seems to matter, even when people act out of generosity. I believe that the key explanations are found in the regulation of values and interests entailed in the practice of the social contract. The cross-cultural design of this study offers an opportunity to explore systematically these values and interests in social support. My purpose is to understand how culture and society shape giving, both theoretically and empirically.

This framework derives from an analysis of comparative patterns of support, the different conditions in which support is perceived to be successful or unsuccessful, and the degree to which different values and interests are prioritized in helping arrangements.