Looking Back and Looking Forward: A Conversation on Japan and Canada’s Ageing Societies

The Centre for the Study of Global Japan welcomed Professor Hiroko Akiyama to present her research on the ageing societies. Professor Akiyama was joined by Prof. Margarita Estevez-Abe and Professor Michelle Silver for discussions following the presentation. This webinar was moderated by Professor Ito Peng.

Speaker Bios:

Hiroko Akiyama, a gerontologist, is professor of emeritus at the University of Tokyo and the former vice president of Science Council of Japan. Professor Akiyama has conducted a number of cross-national surveys and is widely recognized as an expert on issues of global aging. She is known for the long-running research on the elderly in Japan—tracking the aging patterns of approximately 6,000 Japanese elderly over 30 years. She also initiated social experiment projects that pioneer to re-design communities to meet the needs of the highly aged society, and more recently Kamakura Living Lab, a platform for open innovation by co-creation among users, industry, government and academia. She started the Institute of Gerontology at University of Tokyo in 2006. Professor Akiyama received Ph.D. in psychology from University of Illinois, the United States.

Margarita Estevez-Abe teaches political science at the Maxwell School, Syracuse University. She works in the sub-field of political science called comparative political economy of advanced industrial countries. She is interested in how political and economic institutions are constructed differently across countries and in their varying effects on politics and ordinary people’s lives. Her work so far has dealt with Japanese political economy, the Varieties of Capitalism, and comparative political economy of gender.

Michelle Silver is an Associate Professor of Gerontology at the University of Toronto where she holds appointments in the Department of Health and Society, Sociology, and Public Health. Her book, Retirement and Its Discontents, was published in 2018 by Columbia University Press. Her work has been featured in Forbes, the Times Literary Supplement, Zoomer, Next Avenue, The Globe and Mail, Global News, and other popular media sources. She received a BA, BS, and MPP from the University of California, Berkeley and a PhD from the University of Chicago. She is currently chair of the Department of Health and Society at the University of Toronto Scarborough.

Professor Ito Peng is a Canada Research Chair in Global Social Policy at the Department of Sociology, University of Toronto. She is an expert in global social policy, specializing in gender, migration and care policies. She has written extensively on social policies and political economy of care in Asia Pacific. Her teaching and research focus on comparative social policy, and family, gender, employment and migration policies. She just completed an international partnership research project entitled Gender, Migration, and the Work of Care (http://cgsp.ca/), and is now engaged in two research projects: The Care Economy: Gender-sensitive Macroeconomic Models for Policy Analysis, and Care Economies in Context: Towards Sustainable Social and Economic Development.

Sponsored by the Centre for the Study of Global Japan and the Consulate General of Japan in Toronto.