Philosophical study of life, death, and nature

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A classic book in Japanese bioethics. This is a book that helped shift the Japanese discussion on brain death from "brain-centered analysis" to "human relationship oriented analysis." Brain death is redefined as a form of human relationships between a comatose patient and the people surrounding him/her.

In this book I paid special attention to the emotional aspect of the family members of a brain dead person, because sometimes the family members at the bedside, touching the warm body of the patient, express the feeling that the brain dead person still continues to exist as a living human being. This approach, published more than 20 years ago, has deeply influenced Japanese bioethics.

In Chapter 5, I discussed the difference between "death of myself" and "death of the other," and explored its implication for our view of life and death. In Chapter 6 and 7, I discussed the fate of modern medicine and advanced scientific civilization. The concept of irreplaceability is introduced as a keyword in the last chapter. See also the paper, "Reconsidering Brain Death," Hastings Center Report, 2001.

1. What Doctors May not Know
2. What is Brain Death for the Family?
3. The "Person" Whose Brain Stopped Functioning
4. The Condition of a "Brain Dead Person"
5. Are "Persons" Limited to Those Who are "Alive?"
6. Correlation Between People Around a Brain Dead Person

Chapter 2 
What Kind of Place is an Intensive Care Unit?
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1. Intensive Monitoring and Visiting Limitations in the ICU
2. The Integration of Compartmentalized Medical Treatment
3. The System of Supervision and Efficient Treatment
4. The Problem of a Brain Dead Person Occupying a Bed
5. Funding Treatment and Providing Iinsurance for Brain Dead People
6. What is the Best Way to Treat and Nurse a Brain Dead Person?
7. Medical Treatment that Centers around Care of the Sphere of Person to Person Relationships
8. Caring for Brain Dead People
9. Moving the Bed outside the ICU
10. From Life Saving Medicine to Medicine Centered around Nursing
11. Implementing Attendance as a Form of Medical Treatment

Chapter 3 
The Light and Shadow of Organ Transplantation

Chapter 4 
Various Uses of a Brain Dead Body

Chapter 5 
My Death and the Death of Others
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1. The Death of a Person is not Limited to Only the Medical and Legal Aspects
2. My Death, the Death of a Person Familiar to Me, and the Death of a Person Unfamiliar to Me
3. The Meaning of Death to a Person Directly Concerned with that Death

Chapter 6 
Compartmentalization of Modern Medicine

Chapter 7 
Efficiency and Irreplaceability
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1. “Medical Treatment as Repair”
2. The Pursuit of Efficiency
3. The Ideology of a Society That Distributes Goods
4. Respecting Irreplaceability
5. The Antinomy of “Efficiency” and “Irreplaceability”
6. The Logic of “Onlookers” and the Logic of Those Directly Involved

Book Reviews

Robert D. Truog, MD, Harvard University - "I think your way of presenting these three categories and explaining the differences between them in terms of the relationships between people is a wonderful and very useful insight....." (Commentary on "Brain Dead Person" Chapter 1 [Nov.24,2001] ) >> Read more

Chihi - "This is a must book for all those who want to think about "brain death." I think this is a great book." (An excerpt from bk1 book review, Feb.26, 2002)

Publication Data

Tokyo Shoseki, Tokyo, Mar.,1989, Out of Print
--- Fukutake Shoten, Tokyo, Jun.,1991, Out of Print
--- Hozokan, Tokyo, Jul.,2000, 271pages, 2400yen.
Written in Japanese

Japanese website of this book
You can read the entire Japanese text.

Tokyo Shoseki edition (1989)

Fukutake Bunko edition (1991)

Hozokan edition (2000)