What Is Konenki?

Whether it’s because of culture or a lack of awareness, there’s still a dark shadow surrounding menopause on the Western side of the world. But did you know there are better ways to interpret and experience this stage of life?

In Japan, for instance, menopause is called Konenki and it’s considered a time of renewal and regeneration, a time for women to “rebirth” through a process of heightened awareness that brings a sense of new purpose and growth.  When compared to the negative connotations about menopause that abound in Western society, Konenki is a refreshing take on ageing. Menopause for women everywhere presents challenges, still, the power of Konenki reminds us that life is not over just because we’re not fertile anymore.

Of course, Japanese women’s bodies experience the same physical transitions during menopause as women around the world, but their approach is interpreted as more gentle easing into advanced age. They understand that their new life phase means breaking free of the ‘mother-wife’ role responsibility and embracing new possibilities.

Basically, while in the West menopause and ageing are still taboo or something to be ashamed of, in Asian cultures, women look forward to it, because it signals a rise in status and respect within their community and that can ease symptoms or at least a less dramatic approach to it.

Konenki, a time of growth

If you wonder why is it that women in Eastern cultures don’t seem to suffer in the same way that women in the West do, Margaret Lock, a distinguished Canadian medical anthropologist, and author of “Encounters with Aging: Mythologies of Menopause in Japan and North America“, seems to have found the right answer. 

She argues that “some needs of the women who come to menopause have been constructed as dominant narratives so that there is more room for the promotion of various consumer products to their face. How much of how we experience during menopause depends on the place, the culture, the myths, the hierarchical relationships within which the experience takes place“. 

Melissa Melby, Ph.D., an anthropologist at the University of Delaware who has spent over 20 years studying aging, menopause, and maternal-child health in Japan, also explains that while Western biomedical ideas have shaped Japanese women’s perceptions of the transition, their symptoms tend to be milder than those experienced by North American women.

Drawing inspiration from her mentor Margaret Lock, Melby conducted an extensive, years-long study involving weekly blood tests, daily symptom checklists, and interviews with 140 women. She found that in the 1980s, women described konenki as an imbalance of the autonomic nervous system, but by the early 2000s, they framed it in terms of hormonal changes: a subtle reflection of Western influence.

Yet, unlike in Western culture, the idea of hormone deficiency never took deep root. “Most women seemed to view konenki as a transition after which they and their bodies would reach a new equilibrium,” Melby says, “not the ‘beginning of the end’ and the start of inevitable decline.”

These assumptions open up some questions. Obsviously, mindset can play a huge role in how women experience menopause. So, to what extent is menopause “IS” and to what extent “DO WE THINK IT IS”? If wisdom and life experience were celebrated more in society, rather than just the glorification of youth, would the experience be different? 

We’d love to hear your thoughts.

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