Why is human relationship important?

It is worth noticing that just before we introduced bioethics from the USA, we had a nation-wide debate on brain death. Not only specialists but also journalists and lay people actively joined the debate. Japan was one of the few countries where a serious discussion on brain death lasted for a long period of time, more [180/181] than 15 years. More than a hundred books on brain death appeared. There has been no such public discussion on brain death in North America up until the present. As a result, many Japanese scholars realized that American bioethics did not solve difficult problems they had encountered in the debate on brain death. In 1989, I published my second book, Brain Dead Person, in Japanese, stating that brain death should be interpreted as a form of “human relationships” (Morioka 1989). I paid special attention to the emotions and relationships within 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 human being. My conclusion was as follows:

“Brain death is not found in the brain of a “person whose brain ceased functioning,” but in the realm of human relationships surrounding this person. What we should consider is “the realm of brain death,” or “brain death as a field.” In other words, the essence of “brain death” can be found in the relationships between people (idem:9).

This book marked the beginning of the “human relationship oriented analysis” of brain death. Readers welcomed my perspective. This shows that Japanese academic bioethics attached great importance to “human relationships” from the start and that modern individualism and human relationships were particularly important topics for Japanese bioethics in the 1980s (Morioka 1995).


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Cross-cultural Approaches to the Philosophy of Life in the Contemporary World
(2004)
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