Chi no michi as metaphor: conversations with Japanese women about menopause

The objective of this study was to investigate Japanese women's interpretation and verbal expression of the menopausal transition. The fieldwork on which this paper is based was conducted in Ehime Prefecture, Japan, for nine months in 1992-1993. Primary methods included participant observation and qualitative ethnographic interviews with 49 Japanese women. An expression that emerged in interviews was 'chi no michi' (path/way of blood), which represents a range of stories about a sense of control over one's health, including explanations and strategies for avoiding suffering at menopause. This metaphorical idiom is characterized by imaginative, emotive, and practical reasoning; and it expresses physiological symptoms not as merely private, embodied events, but as social and cultural phenomena also. As such, this expression challenges purely biomedical explanations and amounts to resistance against globalizing definitions of the embodied experience of menopause. This study suggests that analyzing metaphors that emerge in everyday conversation can yield vital data about how people make sense of symptoms and aim to prevent them.