Yold

By Virginia Jasmin Pasalo

A few years back while riding in a bus in Japan, I noticed an elderly Japanese woman standing on the aisle. I immediately stood up and offered my seat. She just looked at me and smiled and refused to take the seat. When we alighted from the bus, she was the first to get down, and walked much faster than the teenagers who walked towards the same route. She must be in her 80s.

We were visiting a tomato farm in the countryside, frequently visited by local tourists for the “joy of picking” above anything else. There were couples with their children, teenagers, students, but the most remarkable presence were the elderly people. According to the manager, the structure for picking was designed for the elderly, so that they will not have to stoop down to pick fruits, but will be able to do so standing up, with relative ease. Today’s elderly people have more money and the tourism industry is focusing on projects and infrastructure that capitalize on the needs and the financial capacity of this sector.

On the train, I looked at the window and noticed another elderly woman, walking briskly beside the train tracks, with bags in both hands. I realized that these women were not exceptions, Japanese women in their 80s were as healthy as 60 years old! They are living testimonies of defiance, challenging existing concepts of social constructs regarding retirement, where grandparents exist only to look after their grandchildren.

Here in the Philippines, women in their eighties are generally much more attuned to the traditional retirement, family-focused, and being looked after by their grandchildren. However, there is an increasing number of women in their early eighties engaged in social and civic mobilizations, that would put younger women trailing way behind their activism.

These women are in between the middle-old and the old-old, based on the classification made by William Little in the book Introduction to Sociology – 1st Canadian Edition, which divided the older adult population into three life-stage subgroups: “the young-old (approximately 65–74), the middle-old (ages 75–84), and the old-old (over age 85).”

A more interesting set of the adult population are those belonging to the young-old or the “yold”, as the Japanese refer to people aged between 65 to 75. In an article by correspondent John Parker of The Economist entitled, The decade of the “young old” begins, he predicts that this cluster of older people will not be retiring, but will continue to work and remain socially-engaged, and “in their new guise as the young old, will change the world, as they have done several times before at different stages of their lives.”

According to this article, “the over-60s are one of the fastest-growing groups of customers of the airline business. The yold are vital to the tourism industry because they spend much more, when taking a foreign holiday, than younger adults. They are also changing education. Harvard has more students at its Division for Continuing Education (for mature and retired students) than it does at the university itself. And, because of the importance of pensions, the yold are transforming insurance companies from passive distributors of fixed annuities to financial-service providers for customers who want to manage their pension pots more actively.“

The reality of the yold will change the rest of the service industry, as well as the financial markets, as it is already changing education and the tourism industry. The future does not only belong to the young, it belongs also to the yold. Tom Mann was wrong when he said that “the future of the world belongs to the youth of the world, and it is from the youth and not from the old that the fire of life will warm and enlighten the world. It is your privilege to breathe the breath of life into the dry bones of many around you.”

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