The external circumstances tended to reinforce the pattern of Issei being predominantly friends with other Issei. Unlike their children, they tend to rely primarily on Japanese-language media (newspapers, television, movies), and in some senses, they tend to think of themselves as more Japanese than Canadian or American. Issei women Issei women's lives were somewhat similar, despite differences in context, because they were structured within interlocking webs of patriarchal relationships, and that consistent subordination was experienced both as oppressive and as a source of happiness. The Issei women lived lives of transition which were affected by three common factors: the dominant ideology of late Meiji Japan, which advanced the economic objectives of the Japanese state; the patriarchal traditions of the agricultural village, which arose partly as a form of adjustment to national objectives and the adjustment to changes imposed by modernization; and the constraints which arose within a Canadian or American society dominated by racist ideology. Substantive evidence of the working lives of Issei women is very difficult to find, partly for lack of data and partly because the data that do exist are influenced by their implicit ideological definition of women. Within the framework of environmental contradictions, the narratives of these women revealed a surprisingly shared sense of inevitability, a perception that the events of life are beyond the control of the individual, which accounts for the consistency in the way in which Issei women, different and individual in many ways, seem to have structured their emotions—and this quality of emotional control was passed to their Nisei children. Aging The kanreki (還暦), a traditional, pre-modern Japanese rite of passage to old age at 60, was sometimes celebrated by the Issei and is now being celebrated by increasing numbers of Nisei. Rituals are enactments of shared meanings, norms, and values; and this Japanese rite of passage highlights a collective response among the Nisei to the conventional dilemmas of growing older. Japanese American photographer and former social worker Mary Koga documented members of her parents' generation in their twilight years. Her Portrait of the Issei in Illinois series shows Koga at ease with these people in a relaxed atmosphere. Done over a long period from the 1970s to the 1990s, the images show her elderly subjects at the day care facility and the Senior Citizens Work Center of the Japanese American Service Committee (JASC) and at Heiwa Terrace, a Japanese American senior