| Budget Amount *help |
¥1,900,000 (Direct Cost: ¥1,900,000)
Fiscal Year 2006: ¥800,000 (Direct Cost: ¥800,000)
Fiscal Year 2005: ¥1,100,000 (Direct Cost: ¥1,100,000)
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| Research Abstract |
This research started to investigate the Japanese retired seniors and Japanese overseas students, looking at how they adjust to and experience their new cultures. However, as there are few research studied retired seniors, to understanding the reality of retired seniors staying overseas became the first priority of this research.
This study, which interviewed with about 60 Japanese seniors in Australia and Thailand, explains the social background in Australia and Thailand, how and why receive retired seniors from Japan. It describes the bright lives of seniors enjoying golf or new interpersonal relationships in new environment, and also the dark side of "long-stay" ; the Japanese seniors decided to stay overseas because of the worries for their pension, the seniors who cannot live in Japan with their low pension, or the male single seniors who find nowhere to fit in Japan.
Regarding cultural contact, this investigates their interpersonal interaction in the host context considering the ar
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ea they stay. In addition, their language ability, stress during the communication, and their perception towards host cultural norms were also grasped through the interview to understand the relationship between these factors. As the result, it is found out that Australian context and Thai context have many differences for Japanese seniors. In Australia, it is reported that the couples, wife and husband, often go out, do the same activities and stay together, they have strong ties. In Thailand, there are big Japanese community and active interaction among them. It is considered that cultural distance between Thailand and Japan is further than that of Japan and Australia. However, Japanese seniors staying in Thailand have active interaction and low level of stress during the communication with their hosts though they have low Thai language ability. On the other hand, Japanese seniors in Australia have higher stress and their interaction with the hosts varies depending on the individuals, despite their higher English language ability.
As the findings which are different from current cultural contact theories, it is recognized that retired seniors are well-adjusted to their new environment even they do not understand the host cultural norms and not have much interaction with the hosts. In addition, it found cases where people can obtain better and healthy psychological status when they move away from their original cultural norms ; for example, the seniors who feel comfortable not to worry about Japanese complicated interpersonal norms, or, single male seniors who find their place to fit in among the other single males and local women. Less
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