Final Days: Japanese Culture and Choice at the End of Life

Long (anthropology, John Carroll U., Cleveland) spent over a decade investigating the social and cultural nature of end-of-life decisions in Japan, the nation with the world's longest life expectancies and a distinctly postindustrial pattern of causes of death. Her ethnography of the final days of life considers bioethical issues such as the words, metaphors, and narratives ordinary people draw on in thinking about what constitutes "a good death"; who makes decisions about a dying patient; the use of high-tech treatments at the end of life; debates about brain death and organ transplantation; and ways of dealing with dying, from hospices to euthanasia. Annotation ©2005 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)

Final Days: Japanese Culture And Choice at the End of Life

History

Long, Susan Orpett

Asia

Univ of Hawaii Pr

In postindustrial societies, people must consciously define their individuality through the choices they make. Recently, death has become yet another realm of personal choice, making a "good death" one in which we die in our "own way." Does culture matter in these decisions? Final Days represents a new perspective on end-of-life decision-making, arguing that culture does make a difference but not as a checklist of customs or as the source of a moral code. Grounded in rich ethnographic data, the book offers a superb examination of how policy and meaning frame the choices Japanese make about how to die. As an essay in descriptive bioethics, it engages an extensive literature in the social sciences and bioethics to examine some of the answers people have constructed to end-of life issues. Like their counterparts in other postindustrial societies, Japanese find no simple way of handling situations such as disclosure of diagnosis, discontinuing or withholding treatment, organ donation, euthanasia, and hospice. Through interviews and case studies in hospitals and homes, Susan Orpett Long offers a window on the ways in which "ordinary" people respond to serious illness and the process of dying. Moving beyond stereotypes of stylized samurai violence and Buddhist meditation as Japanese cultural models of dying, Long offers fresh insights into how experiential and social factors mediate between formal cultural rules and what people do. Given the existence of various culturally legitimate scripts on how to die well and the complex nature of human relationships, she makes a convincing and original argument that ambivalence need not be viewed as anomalous. Indeed, ambiguity and a diversity of views are not obstacles to the moral life of a society, but rather are the raw material in postindustrial societies from which people construct meaningful deaths and thus meaningful lives.

Parenting & Relationships

University of Hawaii Press

This book provides a valuable introduction to historical and sociological studies of family change in Japan. The author discusses the organization and assumptions of the academic disciplines, introduces resources for cross-cultural research on family change, and summarizes research results in areas such as infanticide, preindustrial mobility, family size and structure, family relations, mate selection, and the elderly. Summaries of Japanese studies and translated tables and graphs are integrated with materials from relevant English language publications from the perspective of life course theory. The book points out difficulties in cross-cultural research but stresses the vital contributions of such insights for the understanding of family change.

Family Change and the Life Course in Japan (Cornell East Asia Series) (Cornell East Asia Series, 44)

Cornell East Asia Series

From the deathbed to the commuter railway station, from the marriage market to the fish market, from the baseball field to the grave, this volume explores the diversity of contemporary Japanese society by studying how people "compose" their families, their communities, and their own identities. Challenging fixed boundaries characteristic of institutional analysis, these essays comprise an anthropology of real people who age, who play, and whose lives speak to ours even over chasms of cultural differences and misunderstandings. The contributors are historians, sociologists, and anthropologists of Japan who engage these ideas in their research and who have been inspired over the years by the spirit of David Plath's anthropology of self. Part I includes essays by Susan Long, Kamiko Takeji, and Scott Clark which explore how the meaning of self is created through long-term engagement with convoys, those with whom one coauthors biographies. The second set of chapters investigates the process of creating circles of interaction, identity, and meaning beyond that inner circle. Keiko Ikeda considers the cocreation of individual and collective meanings among consociates of locality. The chapters by Paul Noguchi and by David McConnell and Jackson Bailey describe negotiations of identity among consociates within the workplace, while Theodore Bestor and William Kelly focus on constructions of regional and national identity. In Part III, chapters by Christie Kiefer, John Grossberg, Morioka Kiyomi, and Robert J. Smith bring us full circle to reconsideration of composing the self, but within the widest possible social universe that includes the aging, the dying, and the spirits of the dead.

Lives in Motion: Composing Circles of Self and Community in Japan (Cornell East Asia Series) (Cornell East Asia Series, 106)

Self-Help

Motivational

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Final Days: Japanese Culture And Choice at the End of Life

Final Days: Japanese Culture and Choice at the End of Life

Family Change and the Life Course in Japan (Cornell East Asia Series) (Cornell East Asia Series, 44)

Lives in Motion: Composing Circles of Self and Community in Japan (Cornell East Asia Series) (Cornell East Asia Series, 106)