Background The number of medical lawsuits in Japan was between 14 and 21 each year before 1998, but increased to 24 to 35 per year after 1999. There were 210 lawsuits during this 10-year period. There is a need for skills and knowledge related to ethics, which is as fundamental to the practice of medicine as basic sciences or clinical skills. in Japan education in ethics is relatively rare and its importance is not yet recognized. Establishing ethics education using legal (...) precedents, which has already been achieved in Western countries, will be a very important issue in Japan. In the present study, a questionnaire survey was conducted among graduate intern doctors, in order to investigate whether ethics education using precedents might have a positive effect in Japan. Methods In 2002, a questionnaire survey entitled Physicians' Clinical Ethics was carried out in a compulsory orientation lecture given to trainees before they started clinical practice in our hospital. The attendees at this lecture were trainees who came from colleges in various districts of Japan. During the lecture, 102 questionnaires were distributed, completed by attendees and collected. The recovery rate was 100%. The questionnaire consisted of 22 questions (in three categories), of which 20 were answered by multiple choices, and the other two were answered by description. The time required to complete the questionnaire was about 10 minutes. Results The recovered questionnaires were analyzed using statistical analysis software (SPSS for Windows, Release 10.07J-1/June/2000), in addition to simple statistical analysis. answers using multiple choices for the 20 questions in the questionnaire were input into SPSS. The principal component analysis was performed for each question. As a result, the item that came to the fore was "legal precedent". Since many intern doctors were interested in understanding laws and precedents, learning about ethical considerations through education using precedents might better meet with their needs and interests. Conclusion We applied a new method in which the results of principal component analysis and frequencies of answers to other questions were combined. From this we deduced that the precedent education used in Western countries was useful to help doctors acquire ethical sensitivity and was not against their will. A relationship was found between reading precedents and the influence of lawsuits, and it was thought that student participation-type precedent education would be useful for doctors in order to acquire ethical sensitivity. (shrink)

Background Against a background of on the one hand, a declining demography and a conservative family register system that emphasizes the importance of the blood line, and on the other hand, an increase in the number of people undergoing fertility treatment, the absence of a legal regulatory framework concerning ART matters is likely to result in an increasing number of contradictory situations. It is against this background that the paper sets out to examine the judgements of court cases related to (...) ART, with a particular focus on the legal determination of parental status, and to link these to aspects of the legal and socio-ethical environment within which the courts make their judgements. Methods The methods used were thorough investigation of all the court cases concerning ART in the public domain in Japan, including the arguments of the concerned parties and the judgements so far delivered. With the court cases as a central focal point, trends in Japan, including deliberations by government and academic societies, are reviewed, and the findings of surveys on the degree of understanding and attitudes among the people toward ART are summarized. Results In terms of the judgements to date, the central criteria used by the courts in determining parental status were the act of parturition and the consent of the husband of the concerned couple. The government and academic societies have displayed a cautious attitude toward ART, but the findings of attitude surveys among the people at large show a generally positive attitude toward ART. Attitudes toward the overwhelming importance hitherto attached to the bloodline are also seen to be changing. Conclusion The main conclusion is that in the absence of a legal regulatory framework for ART, there is likely to be an increase in the contradictions between the use of outdated legal precedents and the technical development of ART. Since much of the specialist discussion necessary for the formulation of a legal framework has already been carried out, the speedy enactment of comprehensive and at the same time flexible legislation would be highly desirable, but further wide-ranging discussion involving the general public is likely to be needed first. (shrink)

v. 1. Introduction, text & indices -- v. 2. Introduction and English translation.

Very few attempts have been made to survey patient opinions, particularly regarding the use of residual biospecimens and health information in research, to clarify their values. We conducted a questionnaire survey that targeted outpatients of a university hospital to gauge their awareness levels and understand patient perspectives on research that uses these items. Few patients felt that obtaining individual consent for each research study was necessary. Most patients expressed the view that researchers should be obligated to inform them about the (...) research use of their items and be subject to self-directed rules. The research community should try to obtain “societal consent regarding an opt-out system” from the public. A salient value-sharing-based governance structure is necessary for obtaining public trust. (shrink)

This Volume Consists Of Articles Written By Japanese Scholars Who Are Actively Engaged In The Various Fields Of Indological Studies. It Contains Twenty Articles Divided Into Two Groups I: Epic And Purana And Ii: Hindu Philosophical Traditions And Gives The Readers An Insight Into The Present Tendency Of Epic, Puranic And Philosophical Studies In Japan.

In a study concerning visual body part recognition, a “self-advantage” effect, whereby self-related body stimuli are processed faster and more accurately than other-related body stimuli, was revealed, and the emergence of this effect is assumed to be tightly linked to implicit motor simulation, which is activated when performing a hand laterality judgment task in which hand ownership is not explicitly required. Here, we ran two visual hand recognition tasks, namely, a hand laterality judgment task and a self-other discrimination task, to (...) investigate whether the self-advantage emerged even if implicit motor imagery was assumed to be working less efficiently and how individual traits [such as autistic traits and the extent of positive self-body image, as assessed via the Autism Spectrum Quotient and the Body Appreciation Scale-2, respectively] modulate performance in these hand recognition tasks. Participants were presented with hand images in two orientations [i.e., upright and upside-down ] and asked to judge whether it was a left or right hand. They were also asked to determine whether it was their own, or another person’s hand. Data collected from men and women were analyzed separately. The self-advantage effect in the hand laterality judgment task was not revealed, suggesting that only two orientation conditions are not enough to trigger this motor simulation. Furthermore, the men’s group showed a significant positive correlation between AQ scores and reaction times in the laterality judgment task, while the women’s group showed a significant negative correlation between AQ scores and differences in RTs and a significant positive correlation between BAS-2 scores and dprime in the self-other discrimination task. These results suggest that men and women differentially adopt specific strategies and/or execution processes for implicit and explicit hand recognition tasks. (shrink)

Ongoing research on making “human-animal chimeras” or “animals containing human material” to solve the shortage of organs available for transplantation has raised many ethical issues regarding the creation and utilization of such constructs, including cultural views regarding the status of those creations. A pilot study was conducted to explore Japanese public attitudes toward human-animal chimeras or ACHM. The February 2012 study consisted of focus group interviews with citizens from the Greater Tokyo Area, aged between 20 and 54. The 24 participants (...) were divided into four groups. Transcripts of the interviews were analyzed and participants’ attitudes categorized. Five categories of participant attitudes were identified: resistance to the unnatural, concerns about animal welfare, concerns about controlling human-animal chimeras, concerns about the possible birth of intermediate entities, and resistance to creating and utilizing animals containing my material or my child’s material. Our FGI results showed a broader and greater variety of public concerns than those reported in previous studies. While researchers have tried to establish new methods to avoid creating intermediate entities, our participants expressed concerns about not only intermediate entities but also animals containing their own material or their child’s material. Based upon their responses in the interviews, we are introducing a new ethical concern: “animals containing my material/my child’s material.”. (shrink)

Pragmatism emphasizes practical consequences and empirical explanations rather than introspective contemplations. However, the arguments of pragmatists are not uniform, as shown by the four prominent pragmatists presented in this article. The major difference between them is that Peirce and Haack acknowledge an objective truth, whereas James and Rorty do not. Thus, for a fuller understanding of the pragmatist view of our knowledge, both camps must be consulted. In the nursing field, pragmatism is occasionally referred to as a guiding philosophy. However, (...) the influence of James and Rorty has been greater than that of Peirce and Haack on pragmatists, which may risk leading to a skewed understanding of pragmatism by nursing scholars. Still, the four pragmatists share naturalism, which rejects a metaphysics that defines the nature of knowledge before our enquiry and emphasizes experience and practice. Pragmatic naturalism can help ensure that nursing theory does not deviate from clinical practice. This article also explores the broad adaptability of the ideas of all four pragmatists to philosophical issues in nursing, such as mixed‐methods research, epistemic relativism and realism. By showing that pragmatism can be relevant and stimulating to each of these topics, the article demonstrates that the different approaches to pragmatism can provide more inspiration for nurses and nursing researchers in the future. (shrink)

What is culture? What can we learn from art, architecture, and fashion about how people relate? Can cultures embody ethical and moral ideals? These are just some of the questions addressed in this book on the cultural philosophy of three preeminent Japanese philosophers of the early twentieth century, Nishida Kitarō, Watsuji Tetsurō and Kuki Shūzō.

In this study, we explored how the modality would affect the input, visuo-motor coordination, and execution in the advanced pianist's sight-reading processes, as well as relations among these three phases. Thirty-two advanced pianists with 5–54 years of piano training participated in the study. All participants sight-read three two-voice pieces in either major or minor mode while their eye movements were measured by an eye-tracking device. All pieces were 20-measure long written in 4/4 m, adapted from unfamiliar Baroque pieces. Results showed (...) that sight-readers fixated more frequently and tended to spend more time performing in a minor score than in a major score. This implies that modality of a score affects an efficiency of input and visuo-motor coordination in the advanced pianist's sight-reading. Spearman's correlation coefficients showed that errors were correlated positively with the number of fixations and the duration of performance. These results add more evidence to the notion that efficiencies in input and visuo-motor coordination are related to the accuracy in execution. (shrink)

Cultural differences in daily emotions were investigated by administering emotion questionnaires four times a day throughout a one-week period. Respondents were American students, Japanese students living in the United States, and Japanese students living in Japan. Americans rated their emotional lives as more pleasant than did the Japanese groups. The dimension of emotional pleasantness (unpleasant-pleasant) was predicted better by interdependent than independent concerns in the Japanese groups, but this was not the case in the American group where the variance predicted (...) by interdependent and independent concerns did not significantly differ. It is argued that cultural differences in the concerns most strongly associated with pleasantness are related to differences in ideals, norms, and practices of what it means to be a person. Cultural differences in the concerns are assumed to implicate differences in the nature of emotional experience. (shrink)

In this book, Graham Mayeda demonstrates how Watsuji Tetsuro and Kuki Shuzo, two twentieth-century Japanese philosophers, criticize and interpret Heideggerian philosophy, articulating traditional Japanese ethics in a modern idiom.

In this book, Graham Mayeda demonstrates how Watsuji Tetsuro and Kuki Shuzo, two twentieth-century Japanese philosophers, criticize and interpret Heideggerian philosophy, articulating traditional Japanese ethics in a modern idiom.

RÉSUMÉ: Pour plusieurs, la troisième notion primitive, celle de l'union de l'esprit et du corps, est un ajout obscur et inexplicable dans la philosophie de Descartes, et qui est venu après coup. Je soutiens, pour ma part, que nous pouvons réconcilier la conception que se fait Descartes de cette troisième notion primitive avec l'approche dualiste des Méditations par le biais d'un modèle non représentationnaliste des passions. Je montre, pour y parvenir, que les passions, qui sont des manifestations de la troisième (...) notion primitive, sont autoréflexives et présentent ainsi la même structure que la conscience du cogito. (shrink)

RÉSUMÉPour plusieurs, la troisième notion primitive, celle de l'union de l'esprit et du corps, est un ajout obscur et inexplicable dans la philosophie de Descartes, et qui est venu après coup. Je soutiens, pour ma part, que nous pouvons réconcilier la conception que se fait Descartes de cette troisième notion primitive avec l'approche dualiste des Méditations par le biais d'un modèle non représentationnaliste des passions. Je montre, pour y parvenir, que les passions, qui sont des manifestations de la troisième notion (...) primitive, sont autoréflexives et présentent ainsi la même structure que la conscience du cogito. (shrink)

In this article, I compare and contrast the phenomenological ethics of Emmanuel Levinas with that of twentieth-century Japanese philosopher, Kuki Shūzō. In the resulting counterpoint, I put special emphasis on the conception of time espoused by each author. I argue that both go astray by mistakenly basing their ethics on the complete otherness of the other (diachrony) rather than recognizing that both the other (diachrony) and I (synchrony) are originally inseparable in experience before the conceptual separation of “me” and “you.” (...) The fetishization of otherness, which is associated with the feminine in the ethics of both philosophers, leads them to overlook how the details of our everyday concrete experience can provide a guide for action. This paper also explores the two East Asian ethical ideals that Kuki proposes–the Buddhist ideal and the ideal of bushidō, the code of the samurai warrior. In his ethics, Kuki prefers the ethics of bushidō to that of Buddhism. I explain how Kuki’s misunderstanding of Buddhism leads him to this choice, and I explore what he overlooked in Buddhist ethics. (shrink)

Background There are several psychosocial and ethical issues surrounding the decision to be a living kidney donor. The present study aimed to determine the perceptions of psychosocial and ethical issues that living kidney donors may have, and analyze their psychological characteristics.Methods Face-to-face semi-structured interviews were conducted with 15 donors. Thematic analysis was then performed to categorize the thematic elements of the transcripts. All procedures were approved by the relevant review board.Results Four main categories were identified: Awareness of family dynamics, barriers (...) to a proper understanding, contrasting psychological effects of recipient presence in clinical practice, insufficient information explained in informed consent.Conclusion Donors felt that they took on the “role as a care giver” for the recipient and were less aware of themselves as patients. This is a new concept that has not been shown in previous studies. Donors exist within the recipient and family, and the range of their autonomy may go beyond the traditional concept of autonomy and be rooted in relational autonomy. This study suggested that medical treatment in the presence of the recipient promotes the relational autonomy of the donor. (shrink)