Human rights and Japanese bioethics: a report from Japan

The main contentions of this paper are two fold. First, there is a more than century-old Japanese tradition of human rights based on a fusion of Western concepts of natural rights and a radical reinterpretation of Confucianism, the major proponent of which was the Japanese thinker Nakae Chomin. Secondly, this tradition, although a minority view, is crucial for remedying the serious defects in the present Japanese medical system. In the latter half of the nineteenth century, Nakae Chomin sought to reinterpret Chinese tradition, especially Confucianism, by injecting the concepts of popular sovereignty and democratic equality, drawn from Western sources. The resulting view maintained the Confucian commitment to a moral nexus for society, but replaced hierarchy with egalitarianism. The pressing need for such an approach to patients' rights in present-day Japan is illustrated by two recent cases: the photographing and commercial exploitation of patients' genitals without serious response by authorities, and the attempt by physicians to manipulate the time of death and, possibly, to improperly pressure family members in order to transplant organs from the brain-dead victim of a criminal assault. Such problems stem from hierarchy and paternalism, which seem to be a legacy of the rapid, state-sponsored introduction of Western medicine in the mid-nineteenth century, and in particular from the government's adoption of and support for German military medicine as a model for Japan.