Fundamental human rights and Japan

After opening the country to the world in 1868, the Japanese were very eager to absorb European ideas, such as “human rights,” “freedom,” and “democracy.” Japanese history of the last 100 years could be illustrated as that of a harsh struggle between people who wanted to maintain hierarchical and paternalistic systems, on the one hand, and people who wanted to replace them with more individualistic ones based on human rights and freedom, on the other. In 1874, Taisuke Itagaki began a nation-wide political movement, “the Freedom and People’s Rights Movement (Jiyuu Minken Undo).” Many thinkers and activists joined Itagaki and were put in jail and killed, but this movement prepared the basis for Japanese democracy. (When Itagaki was stabbed, he is said to have shouted, “Even if itagaki dies, freedom never dies!”) When a group of severely discriminated people (Hisabetsu Buraku Min) demanded their civil rights in 1922, the words they uttered were “freedom,” “liberation,” and “equality.”

The contemporary Japanese bioethics movement began in the early 1970s when disabled people claimed their “right to live” and “disabled children’s right not to be killed by their parents,” and when feminists claimed that their “right” and “freedom” to abortion must be maintained. It is striking that contemporary Japanese bioethics began with voices of minority groups demanding “rights” [185/186] and “freedom.” Since I examined this topic elsewhere (Morioka, 2002), I will not write about it further here.

My point is that voices for “freedom” and “human rights” have already been integral parts of Japanese history and culture. They are part of the Japanese tradition. Here, Sakamoto’s argument that in Asia “the sense of ‘human rights’ is very weak and foreign, and that they have no traditional background for the concept of human rights” cannot be applied to Japan. His claim that “Eventually, there is no room for the idea of fundamental human rights” is unfounded. Most of the younger Japanese philosophers and sociologists who are interested in bioethics take “fundamental human rights” for granted, and then they are trying to fit bioethical ideas into contemporary Japanese culture and relate them to Japanese people’s emotions. They stress the importance of “human relationships” together with “human rights.”


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