Baby you can Drive my Bed: Technology and Old Age in Japanese Animated Film

Narratives of Japan's maturation as a postindustrial society raise critical interest in narratives of personal and collective maturation within the most rapidly aging population in the world. Japanese popular culture is a rich source of representations of tensions between institutional projects of modernization and significant cultural and social changes that these projects have unintentionally engendered. The animated movie Rjin-Z represents the tensions between the experience of old age and high technology and draws attention to how technologies of care are not always socially and culturally attuned to personal biographies. This article proposes linkages between representations of old age, postmodernization of the life course, and structural changes shaped by information technologies in contemporary Japan.