This guest post is by Keiko Shirokawa, a Tokyo-based senior producer for the German television network Zweites Deutches Fernsehen, who has long focused on anti-authoritarian and environmental justice initiatives. She wrote this letter to help persuade a Japanese publisher to acquire the rights. It worked. I just accepted an offer from Korocolor Publishers, which has hired Keiko to be the translator. Thank you, and hooray!.

In Japan – as in many other parts of the world – tackling issues affecting the aging population, improving public health, bolstering the medical system, and raising citizen’s awareness of health issues are critical, yet daunting, tasks. Concurrently, the elderly are barraged by advertising of commodities aimed at elderly consumers. And when the Japanese government recommended that their citizens not rely on the public pension system, they made it clear that they had abandoned means to address this issue of financial security properly.

The absence of a culture in which one feels comfortable can be tormenting to those who look ahead at an extended life expectancy in this super aging society. Contemporary culture - plays, music, literature - fail to speak to their hearts. In Japan, you can find a few who claim the necessity of studying gerontology, which is something, but these studies remain the subject of academia and scientific research.

In my case, I suddenly re-entered the world of broadcast television news when I was contacted to join a news crew covering the areas hit by the earthquake, tsunami on March 11, 2011, followed by the nuclear disaster in Fukushima. I was 63 years old. On that day, I headed to the affected areas where dead bodies could still be found everywhere among the debris. Since that day, I haven’t stopped working for the foreign news agency that hired me then as a news producer. Ten years have passed since I started leading my life in a way so unexpected in Japanese society, and even unexpected to myself. I have been very healthy and competent enough to still keep this demanding job. However, my mind has been full of questions and fears for the many others who are not enjoying such a fulfilling life. And, in my heart, I feel a sense of alienation and isolation in Japanese society because of my age.

Under these circumstances, I came across This Chair Rocks: A Manifesto Against Ageism by Ashton Applewhite. Every point in this book seemed to brush away the cobwebs in my mind. I read it in one sitting. I was wondering how to convey these thoughts to Japanese society, which remains sexist as well as ageist. In other words, I was automatically translating it. Anti-ageism should penetrate Japanese society. I decided that the first thing I had to do was to publish a Japanese version of the book. I was unable to find a translated version of it on the market, so I approached a publisher, Korocolor first, whose reaction was very positive. I then sent an e-mail to Ashton Applewhite directly to ask for permission, which she enthusiastically granted.

In the meantime, the #MeToo movement had spread all around the world, and in Japan as well. A man of my generation and an old acquaintance was condemned because of sexual harassment. That led me back to the writings of the 1970s activists such as Betty Friedan. It was while reading her important book, The Fountain of Age, that I found Ashton Applewhite. Her work addressed so many questions that were filling my mind. I returned to the writings of Simone de Beauvoir as well.

I consider this book as a work that could spark an anti-ageism movement literally. At the same time, I see it as being on the vanguard, conveying a new culture for the elderly. I would like a translation of this book to be a first step in the creation of a new culture for the elderly in Japan and to be ready to make a declaration of anti-ageism to Japanese society. Therefore, it would be good to work with the publisher, Korocolor, which has published several in-depth books on the subject of the racism in Japan and has succeeded in reprinting many of them.

Also, in order to fill the inevitable gap existing between two different cultures, I asked Carol Baldwin, who is my best friend and a film producer and runs a community farm in Connecticut, to help fill in the gaps which might otherwise be lost in translation. She kindly accepted my request. The title, “This Chair Rocks,” is a good example to show the difficulty in translation, as a rocking chair is not associated in Japan with the elderly! Our elderly do not use rocking chairs when they rest; ours is not a chair culture.

I am 100% certain that the sexism I have been experiencing since I was born into Japanese society, the discrimination against Asians I was exposed to while living in the UK, and the ageism I am feeling deeply internally and externally these days should function as an ideological foundation to translate Ashton’s words into accurate and strong Japanese words.

My latest newsletter, announcing a historic event: the launch last week of the World Health Organization's Global Campaign to Combat Ageism, complete with toolkit, video, and gorgeous graphics like this one:

Find them in the Old School Clearinghouse, and read the newsletter for more about what I've been up to.

During my book tour, I often closed readings with a passage about aspiring to “agelessness,” declaring it a form of age denial. A woman at Powell’s Books in Portland said, “Saying you’re ageless seems like saying you’re colorblind,” and the comparison stuck in my head. Later on, Robin DiAngelo’s White Fragility helped me understand the problem with “colorblind": if we don’t see race/color, we don’t see racism. Eventually I put the two ideas together in a graphic that read: “’I’m ageless’ is to ageism as ‘I’m colorblind’ is to racism” and posted it to Instagram. I was pleased with the formulation, and even happier when an ally made the more elegant version below, setting the text against the silhouette of a Black woman.

Until a friend shared a different viewpoint: “As a woman of color I believe both ageism and racism need to be highlighted and addressed in today’s society, but I do not think they can be compared to each other. If it’s with reference to how they intersect, I get it, but when comparing one form of injustice to another, it can be interpreted as disregarding that group’s experiences and feelings. Racism deals with years of oppression, injustice, and countless moments of individuals feeling defeated on the basis of their skin color. Not everyone will know what that feels like, at least not in the eyes of BIPOC.” I apologized and thanked her, and received a gracious thanks for hearing her out.

Then I got defensive. Yes I knew I had to respect her experience as woman of color, but the woman who’d made the original analogy was Black! Yes I knew it was a mistake to compare “isms” (see Straw Man #4), but I was comparing ways of thinking about bias, not the biases themselves! Yes I knew this was defensive-white-person squirming, yet I squirmed. Then I asked for advice.

My partner told me I might be correct but that my friend was right: at the end of the day I was equating the two forms of oppression, which is unacceptable because the overall effects of systemic racism are so much more severe. My friend Julia confirmed it, although they cut me a bit of slack: “When you’re one-up in terms of privilege, when you haven’t had the lived experience, it’s easy to get yourself in hot water.” Julia does diversity and inclusion training professionally, and helped me see the issue as part a pattern of people “not seeing the part of you that maps to marginalization.”

What I should have done is place “I’m ageless” within a broader context. It’s part of a universal phenomenon in which people maintain, often with the best of intentions, that they “don’t see” difference. If “I don’t see your otherness” is a compliment, it reinforces what poet and activist Audre Lorde calls the “mythical norm”—typically white, male, thin, straight, cisgender, and non-disabled—as the standard against which other identities are weighed. The more closely people conform to that “norm,” the more privilege they enjoy. And vice versa: the fewer “boxes” people can check, the more oppression they’re likely to be up against. When people “don’t see” difference, they’re denying the lived experiences of those with less privilege, even though those experiences are at least as valuable.

Other examples?

• “You don’t look trans to me.”
• “I’d never have known you were disabled.”
• “Sometimes I forget you’re Black.”

These experiences are not equivalent. Comments like these come from a place of privilege—from someone who conforms more closely to that “mythical norm” and thinks it’s a compliment to suggest the other person does too. They’re not compliments. They assume that “passing” is the goal, and that difference is something to overcome or overlook.

Our differences, whether of age or background or gender or something else entirely, are real. They’re part of our identities, part of what make us us. Lorde again: “It is not those differences between us that are separating us. It is rather our refusal to recognize those differences, and to examine the distortions which result from our misnaming them and their effects upon human behavior and expectation.” Paradoxically, when we “don’t see” differences, we give them both too much power and too little. We allow them to reinforce hierarchies of human value and at the same time close ourselves off to perceiving their intrinsic worth: the ways in which aspects of ourselves that include age, Blackness, queerness, and disability enrich our lives.

There is no norm. We are not broken. We are not “special.” We are not lesser. We are perfect. Systemic discrimination is a formidable obstacle. But it is real, which makes it easier to tackle than something nonexistent: the imaginary failings which these systems created and need us to believe in.