This volume provides an essential analysis of older adults and representations of ageing in Asia. The collection focuses on increasing age disparities in many Asian societies, the ways in which they are represented historically and into the new millennium in Asian and global multimedia, and the effects such changes have on the societies in which they are taking place. Featuring texts and visual content from and about the Asian diaspora, Bangladesh, China, Japan, Malaysia, South Korea, Sri Lanka, and Vietnam, Volume I of this collection pays particular attention to the manifest ways in which age and national concerns and directives are linked, to the social and economic effects for super-ageing societies, to gender considerations in the representation of older adults, and to the ramifications of changing perceptions of ageing and older adults for future generations. How have traditional perceptions and contemporary transitions been represented, encouraged, or resisted in the multiple platforms of media, from film, literature, and digital streaming services to gaming, graphic fiction, news websites, print media, and advertising? Individually and collectively, these essays examine current perceptions of older adults in an Asian context and the directions that these may take into the 21st century.

Bernard Wilson teaches at Gakushuin University in Tokyo, Japan and specialises in children’s literature and cinema, postcolonialism, and East/West theory. He is widely published in these areas, and his work has appeared in leading international journals and book collections throughout the world. He is the co-editor of The Asian Family in Literature and Film Volumes I and II (Palgrave Macmillan, 2024); Orientalism and Reverse Orientalism in Literature and Film: Beyond East and West (Routledge, 2021); and Asian Children’s Literature and Film in a Global Age: Local, National and Transnational Trajectories (Palgrave Macmillan, 2020).

Sung-Ae Lee is a Lecturer in the School of International Studies at Macquarie University, Sydney, Australia. Her research areas range across Asian cinema, adaptation studies, trauma studies, Korean diaspora, and Korean literature, film and TV drama. She is the author of 40 book chapters and journal articles. Her recent publications include “Past in the present: film and TV drama, Korean families, and the palimpsestic Neo-Confucian family schema” (in The Asian Family in Literature and Film: Changing Perceptions in a New Age - East Asia, Palgrave Macmillan, 2024) and “Coming-of-age in South Korean Cinema” (in The Oxford Handbook of Children's Film, OUP, 2022).