Anthropology & Aging, Vol 36, No 1 (2015), pp. 62-81 ISSN 2374-2267 (online) DOI 10.5195/aa.2015.83 This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License. This journal is published by the University Library System of the University of Pittsburgh as part of its D-Scribe Digital Publishing Program, and is cosponsored by the University of Pittsburgh Press. Frail, Independent, Involved? Care and the Category of the Elderly in Japan Iza Kavedžija Sainsbury Institute for the study of Japanese Arts an Cultures, Norwich, UK contact: iza.kavedzija@gmail.com Abstract This article examines how the category of the elderly in Japan is constructed through diverse forms of care, understood as moral practices intrinsic to peoples’ senses of self. It offers an analysis of a range of informal as well as institutional configurations of care in the Japanese urban context, highlighting the complexity as well as the overlapping nature of these diverse arrangements. It also explores ethnographically how older people experience these arrangements as they move through different sites of care, and how they negotiate the conflicting demands on their sense of self. The various types of care at work in these settings all contribute to different understandings of older persons, and different constructions of the category of the elderly: as clients; as visitors or guests; as fragile ‘struggling persons’; as ‘grannies’ in familial relations; as (caring) neighbours. More than a handful of labels, these variable configurations of personal identity affect care practices and social relationships in direct and tangible ways. Keywords: Category of the elderly, care, Japan, personhood