Prior to my diagnosis my involvement in community was centred around my extended family and work and work colleagues. Like many people, my family is spread over a large geographic area and meaningful interaction involves physical and social contact. This has necessitated regular travel by private car. Private transport provides a needed degree of flexibility and control that is lacking from public transport. Social interaction within my local community was limited to a small circle of friends who were predominately work colleagues.

Then came my diagnosis. In mid-2013 at the age of 59 I was diagnosed with younger onset dementia. As part of my diagnosis I was given three to six years to live and told that I should retire as soon as possible. I soon began to experience the stigmas associated with dementia that are often the result of people's misconceived stereotypes around dementia. My GP also advised me not to tell anyone I has frontotemporal dementia, but to say that I had frontotemporal degeneration. I didn't understand why she would advise this, but later realised it was a strategy to avoid the stigmas associated with dementia. I was also advised I either had to stop driving or have a driving test. However, it was both expensive and stressful to undergo a ‘fitness to drive’ assessment, just to prove I could still drive. So it felt like there were obstacles being put in the way of me continuing to do the things that were important to me. As I finished work my world of social interactions diminished and my interactions with the broader community contracted. What I experienced I later realised was best described as ‘prescribed disengagement’ (Swaffer, 2015), being advised to withdraw from ‘normal’ life, get my affairs in order and prepare to die. My broad group of social contacts contracted to a few friends and family. My interactions within my local neighbourhood became those oriented around doing ‘essential tasks’ such as grocery shopping and medical appointments – a model that could have been the prototype of ‘social isolation’ in today's world of COVID-19.

After about 18 months of this contracting social world, I was invited to attend an early public meeting of what was to become the ‘Dementia Friendly Kiama Project’.

Introduction

Developing bodies of work in interdisciplinary dementia research are engaging with concepts of place and spatiality as they relate to the everyday experience of living with dementia (Clarke and Bailey, 2016; Odzakovic et al, 2018). Rather than focus on the ‘dis-abilities’ of a person and their effect on navigation or wayfinding, these works have looked first to understand environmental barriers and to improve the enabling characteristics of environments – through features such as signage, pathways and distinctiveness (Mitchell and Burton, 2010). Building upon understanding the role of material geographies is work that engages with more progressive understandings of neighbourhoods as spaces of lived experience, belonging and relational ties (Ward et al, 2018; Clark et al, 2020). This evolving understanding of the vital importance of place and space for people with dementia is in contrast to a spatial literature where the relationship of people with dementia to space was pathologised – for example the reframing of the everyday practice of walking as a form of deviant wandering (Brittain et al, 2017). Rather than support mobility, a pathologising spatial lens problematises outdoor mobility for people with dementia as a health and safety risk and a social burden (MacAndrew et al, 2018). For those receiving a dementia diagnosis, notions like ‘prescribed dis-engagement’ (Swaffer, 2015) can foreclose possibilities for continuing involvement in the everyday spaces of community life. This prevalent narrative within the medicalised model sees dementia as a disease without a cure, with many medical practitioners accompanying diagnoses with instructions to abandon activities that are crucial to well-being and personhood and focus instead on end-of-life affairs and a potential trajectory of suffering.

People living with dementia have the right to freedom of movement and liberty and to be supported to maintain an ‘activity space’ (Hägerstrand, 1970) of regular social activities and movement within their neighbourhoods (Cahill 2018; Steele et al, 2019). These rights are being demanded through dementia activism and a closer alignment with the disability rights movement (Thomas and Milligan, 2018; Shakespeare et al, 2019). A new commitment to inclusion is also evident in some expressions of the international Dementia Friendly Communities (DFC) movement (Alzheimer's Disease International, 2017).

FOR MANY PEOPLE in Japanese Studies, Jim Huffman is probably best known as a scholar of Meiji journalism, and deservedly so. The Meiji press and its journalists serve as a thread connecting many of his books, from his 1980 monograph on Fukuchi Gen’ichirō to his most recent book, Down and Out in Late Meiji Japan, which uses media sources to examine the history of urban poverty in Tokyo.

I developed a special appreciation for Jim's work on the Meiji press while grappling with Meiji-era sumo coverage for my dissertation. His groundbreaking 1997 study, Creating a Public proved invaluable in several respects. The thoroughness and clarity of the work were inspiring, all the more so when I realized that the fine-grained research pre-dated the digitization that was making sources so much more accessible for me. As richly detailed as the study was, it was much more than just a survey with encyclopedic coverage. The arguments were straightforward, yet nuanced, and they provided new understandings of the press, the journalists, and perhaps most importantly, the people of Meiji Japan.

This focus on the people represents another thread in Jim's work that has enriched the field. His studies often seek to uncover the stories of the outsiders or the overlooked. A good number of his journalists in Creating a Public are muckrakers of the best sort, stirring up (much deserved) trouble for those in power. Journalist and educator Edward House, the focus of A Yankee in Meiji Japan is an outsider of a different sort. Down and Out in Late Meiji Japan, Jim's newest book is the culmination of this element of his scholarship. By bringing attention to the lived experiences of the urban poor in Japan, Jim is not only rewriting our understandings of late Meiji society and protest, but also providing a much needed reminder that poverty – past and present – does not make people any less human. These people and their stories matter.

As a professor teaching at a liberal arts college, I am particularly pleased to see that this collection includes multiple examples of a third thread in Jim's scholarship: his pedagogically-oriented works.