The author is a trained linguist and certified nursing assistant with first-hand working experience in institutional eldercare.
Peter Backhaus is Associate Professor at Waseda University, Tokyo. His main research interests are sociolinguistics, pragmatics, and writing and orthography. Publications include Linguistic Landscapes: A Comparative Study of Urban Multilingualism in Tokyo (Multilingual Matters, 2007) and Communication in Elderly Care: Cross-cultural Perspectives (ed., Continuum, 2011).