What a Japanese Scholar's Book on Enjoying Life After 60 Taught Me About Training Memory and Words

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The first time I took notice of the name Shoichi Watanabe was through The Art of Intellectual Life, which I read as a student and which left me dreaming of one day having a proper study of my own. This time I picked up a later book of his, written when he was 81: a collection of practical thoughts on enjoying the years after 60. In the foreword he writes that he intends to live to about 95, keep up the same enjoyable daily activities for the next twenty years, and then die quietly. Reading that at 66, the book felt like a letter from someone seventeen years further down the same road. This is less a review than a record of what I actually started doing after reading it.

An old diary lying open on a writing desk beside an ink bottle, morning light spilling in — the image behind where this record of practices begins: writing memory down.

Practice one: treating memory as the self

Watanabe wonders how a person can claim to be the same individual across a lifetime, given that almost every cell in the body is eventually replaced. The answer he arrives at is memory.

The more carefully I think about what memory actually is, the more I conclude that it is a person's very identity. — from the book

What makes me myself, in other words, is not the body but the continuity of memory. If that's true, then writing memory down is not mere note-taking — it's an act of preserving the self. Reading this gave a name to something I had been doing without quite articulating it: keeping this blog. I don't write it to be answered. The record simply existing, on its own, is enough if it lets someone else facing the same stretch of ageing feel they aren't the only one going through it. And memory weakens with age, but the ability to keep editing a life by writing it does not. Since I started thinking that way, I've fallen into the habit of noting down small daily things. Keeping a record of the garden, I realise now, comes from the same impulse: no garden ever blooms quite the same way twice. This year's roses, and this year's version of me, will exist only in memory by next spring. Writing it down gives me a way back to that particular year — and once I saw it that way, the small effort of keeping the record stopped feeling like a chore.

Practice two: taking Confucius's "I do not yet know life" seriously

The passage that moved me most concerned facing the fear of death. Watanabe quotes Confucius's answer when his disciple Zilu asked him about death.

"I do not yet know life; how could I know death?" — from the book

Watanabe adds that Confucius is thought to have been in his sixties when he said this. I am in that decade now too. Read at twenty, this line would have sounded like a piece of abstract wordplay. Death was still decades off, something that belonged to other people, not to me. Far from having "known life," I hadn't even had the sense of having properly begun it — so Confucius's admission that neither life nor death is fully knowable would have registered as nothing more than a clever line on paper. At 66 it reads differently: not as a refusal to think about death, but as an admission that I have not yet finished learning what it means to be alive — so rather than spend what's left fearing death, I might as well go on tasting life. Death itself can't be solved by the living, however hard we try to puzzle it out — and once you accept that, the energy that went into dreading the unknowable is freed up for the one thing that is knowable: today. There's a kind of defiance in simply giving up on a question that has no answer, and that's what I mean by calling this reading defiant. Among the sufferings Buddhism names, the fear of death itself is one I have only recently begun to loosen my grip on, and I suspect that is one of the few genuine dividends old age pays out. In my younger years death was an abstraction I couldn't quite feel; now, through the illnesses of people close to me and the changes in my own body, it has become something I feel in my bones — not a someday but a certainty. Oddly enough, it's that very concreteness that lets me stop dreading death in the vague and instead put my attention where it belongs: on now. Being able to read this line the way I do now, in a way I could not have at thirty, feels like a small report worth passing on to anyone else standing at this same threshold.

A quiet stretch of water holding the reflection of a sunset, with a single book left on the shore — an image for the shift in mind that came from sitting with Confucius's admission that he did not yet know life.

Practice three: letting go of what isn't mine to control

Another passage that stayed with me came from Epictetus, the Stoic philosopher born into slavery. According to Watanabe, his mother is thought to have been of the slave class, and Epictetus himself was enslaved as a child and often beaten. He was later freed, but before that, a violent master left one of his legs permanently lame. It was this man — someone who had no say over what was done to his own body — who worked out, as far as he could push it, what "the self" actually was. Watanabe cites the line he arrived at as a guide to dealing with illness and physical decline.

Sickness is an impediment to the body, but not to the will... Whenever anything befalls you, remember to turn to yourself and ask what power you have to deal with it. — from the book

The self, in this view, is not the body but the will — and the will is the only thing genuinely within one's own control. Reading it, I found myself mapping it onto the way I was trained to think about the body in Chinese herbal medicine. The approach there is similar: rather than attacking a symptom as an enemy, you acknowledge the constitution as a given — a part that isn't yours to control — and adjust what actually can be adjusted. On a morning my knee aches, for instance, I now try to stop at "the knee, as a part, is out of order" and leave it there. Stopping there is the whole trick. I used to let that thought run on — "what if I can't walk properly," "what does this do to today's plans" — and it was that running-on, not the ache itself, that dragged my mood down. In Epictetus's terms, the spiralling is a separate thing from the fault in the knee; it belongs to how I choose to use my will, not to the injury. The pain itself I can't help. Letting it drag the rest of the day down with it, I don't have to accept automatically. Since I learned to draw that line, I spend noticeably less time being pulled around by the day's aches.

Practice four: training words to meet old age head-on

Watanabe returns again and again to the idea that language is what makes us human.

Language alone is what makes a human being human. — from the book

He lists daily reading aloud, tongue exercises, and even karaoke as his first line of defence against memory loss. Reading it, I realised it described the life I already lead, dividing my year between Britain and Japan: writing this blog in Japanese, keeping a garden journal in English, reading the morning news aloud in both. By Watanabe's logic, this isn't simply language maintenance — it's a way of keeping blood moving to the parts of the brain that language uses. I notice it most in the small detour that happens when I try to carry an idea formed in English over into Japanese. Standing in the garden, the phrase "the roses are past their best" might come to me first in English, and translating it word for word into Japanese never quite sits right. I end up circling through two or three Japanese phrasings — is it "past its peak," is it "past its viewing season" — drifting away from the original English feel before finally landing on the one that fits. It's that inability to translate in a straight line, that looping through the brain before the words arrive, that I mean by the detour. That little detour may be the plainest, most reliable resistance to ageing I have found.

Practice five: walking as meditation

The other practice I adopted almost immediately was what Watanabe calls "walking Zen." He cites American research on the effects of meditation on the brain — the forty-minute figure comes from work by Sara Lazar at Massachusetts General Hospital, who used brain-scan data to show that the cortex actually grows thicker in people who meditate daily.

The thinning of that region of the brain that comes with age may be slowed by forty minutes of quiet meditation a day. — from the book

Sitting still never suited Watanabe, so he built the same effect into his evening walks instead. I've applied the idea to the garden. In the morning, tending the roses or between rounds of watering, I simply walk the beds slowly. Partway through, whatever I had been turning over in my head quietly drops away and there's a moment when nothing exists but the scent of the roses — which I take to be close to what Watanabe means by walking Zen. With more than ten varieties in bloom at different times and with different scents, the same path never feels repetitive, even walked every morning. At an age when nights are broken more than once by trips to the bathroom, I've found that deliberately shaping that first hour of the morning does more for the whole day than I expected.

A rose-garden path glinting with morning dew, walked slowly while the mind wanders — the closest I've come, in my own garden, to what Watanabe calls walking Zen.

Practice six: finding rapture in what is given — where I part company with the book

In the closing chapter, Watanabe points to what he sees as a modern illness: the belief that value comes only from effort. But not everything won by effort has value, he argues, and not everything of value was won by effort — the clearest case being life itself. We didn't earn our own existence through striving; it was simply given to us, by parents, by nature, however you want to put it. If that's so, then what is given to us — life itself, a moment of being struck by beauty — may matter more than what we achieve through effort. He quotes the Edo-period Confucian scholar Sato Issai:

Learn in youth and you will accomplish something in your prime; learn in your prime and you will not decline in old age; learn in old age and you will not decay even in death. — from the book

"Not decay even in death" naturally raises the question of what, exactly, is left over once someone is gone. Watanabe frames this as a wager about whether an afterlife exists. Reading it, I found myself taking a different turn. Elsewhere in the same book he argues that a person lives on for as long as someone remembers them. If that's right, then "not decaying even in death" need not mean leaving a name for history — it can simply mean living on inside someone's memory, or inside a record someone else happens to read. Writing this life down in two languages, Japanese and English, is — I realised only while reading this book — my own extension of Watanabe's claim that language is what makes us human. Keeping the record in two languages may be a way of holding on to the container that is "myself," in old age, doubled, and for a little while longer.

The suffering doesn't disappear. The nights will keep breaking, the knee will keep aching, next year and the year after. Still: treat memory as the self, give full attention to the life you haven't yet finished learning, let go of what was never yours to hold, train the words, settle the mind by walking, and stay alert for what is simply given. Words an 81-year-old scholar wrote down are, seventeen years early, already useful tools in my hands.

The book discussed here:

Shoichi Watanabe, 60-sai kara no Jinsei wo Tanoshimu Gijutsu (Japanese edition, Shodensha Golden Bunko)

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The World Shoichi Watanabe Lived In

An image of a 1940s classroom at the kyūsei chūgaku (old-system middle school) Watanabe attended — a blackboard and wooden desks capturing the mood of a generation that came of age amid Japan's wartime and postwar school reforms.

Shoichi Watanabe (1930–2017) was born in Tsuruoka, Yamagata Prefecture. He was a student at the old-system Yamagata Prefectural Tsuruoka Middle School when Japan's postwar education reform took effect, and graduated from the newly reorganised Tsuruoka Daiichi High School in 1949. That he later looked back on his old-system high school years as the period richest in lasting friendships is, in its way, a very typical sentiment for a generation that came of age amid the upheaval of wartime and postwar Japan. That same year he entered the English literature department at Sophia University, went on to study Western culture at the graduate level, and then studied abroad at the University of Münster in Germany and Oxford University in England. In 1958 he received his doctorate in philosophy from Münster.

The 1950s, when he was a student and young researcher, were years when Japan was still pulling itself out of postwar deprivation. The book's memories of a threadbare dormitory life and of tuberculosis as an everyday threat to fellow students are inseparable from that backdrop. At the same time, the free access he found in German and British university libraries stood in sharp contrast to the academic environment in Japan at the time — an experience that seems to trace a straight line to the "passion for a private study" that, in later years, led him to build a book-storage annex at his own expense.

Back in Japan, he taught at Sophia University, specialising in the history of English linguistics while also writing widely as a commentator on history, education, and the philosophy of success. His best-known work, The Art of Intellectual Life (1976), a practical guide to building an environment for intellectual living, has been read across generations ever since. He was also known as a conservative commentator and served on various government committees, but what comes through in this particular book is a different figure from that public one — a private individual facing, without flinching, the themes of ageing and death that no one escapes.

He died of heart failure at his home in Suginami, Tokyo, on 17 April 2017, at the age of 86. The wish he expressed in this book's foreword, to live to 95, went unfulfilled — but many of the practices he wrote about at 81 turned out to match almost exactly the years he actually lived, never once giving up the life of his study.