Why would a country strongly influenced by Buddhism's reverence for life allow legalized, widely used abortion? Equally puzzling to many Westerners is the Japanese practice of mizuko rites, in which the parents of aborted fetuses pray for the well-being of these rejected "lives." In this provocative investigation, William LaFleur examines abortion as a window on the culture and ethics of Japan. At the same time he contributes to the Western debate on abortion, exploring how the Japanese resolve their conflicting emotions (...) privately and avoid the pro-life/pro-choice politics that sharply divide Americans on the issue. (shrink)

This essay argues that Japan's resistance to the practice of transplanting organs from persons deemed “brain dead” may not be the result, as some claim, of that society's religions being not yet sufficiently expressive of love and altruism. The violence to the body necessary for the excision of transplantable organs seems to have been made acceptable to American Christians at a unique historical “window of opportunity” for acceptance of that new form of medical technology. Traditional reserve about corpse mutilation had (...) weakened and, especially as presented by the theologian Joseph Fletcher, organ donation was touted as both expressive of agape and a way of “updating” Christianity via the ethics of Utilitarianism. Many Japanese, largely Buddhist and Confucian in their orientation, view these changed valorizations as neither necessary nor patently more ethical than those of their own traditions. (shrink)

During the past few decades a growing interest in what is often called the ‘Kyoto School’ of philosophy has evidenced itself here and there in the West, especially in discussions of comparative religious thought and in the pages of journals which are sensitive, in the post-colonial world, to the value of giving attention to contemporary thought that originates outside the Anglo-American and continental contexts. What has made the so-called Kyoto School especially interesting is the fact that those thinkers identified with (...) it obviously possess a wide acquaintance with Western thought but also have a programme of clarifying points at which they, as Japanese philosophers, find Western philosophy either in sum or in its parts inadequate or objectionable. Moreover, inasmuch as the philosophers of the Kyoto School have deliberately reached back into the Mahayana Buddhist component in Japanese civilization in order to find terms, perspectives, and even foundations for their own analyses and constructions, Western students of comparative religion and comparative thought have in the study of this school a unique aperture for observing how a group of thinkers, while sharing modernity and its problems with us, reates both of these to a religious tradition which is in many ways strikingly different from that of the West. (shrink)

Japan's Buddhists view bodily enhancement neither negatively in terms of sin nor positively as repairing the world. They prefer prudence, however, due to the fact that human desires will be enflamed by proffered new biotechnologies and ironically increase psychosocial dissatisfaction. In spite of great pressures for bodily enhancements within in East Asian societies, bioethicists issue strong cautions.

In what follows, I draw on things I have found in Japanese discussions of bioethics in order to clarify some aspects of the ethics of biotechnological enhancement. In doing so it will, I hope, become evident that what we might call a “religious” component is in Japan somewhat differently construed than in the contexts with which we are more likely to be familiar in North America. And in the end an attempt will be made here to show that the materials (...) considered give us all – not just the Japanese – reasons for going forward with biological enhancement technologies only on condition that extreme caution be exercised. The fast-moving, oncoming traffic in this domain ought to be forced, these materials suggest, to come up to a caution-demanding signal – not a green light but one that is unambiguously amber. Caution and perhaps even a full stop appear to be in order. (shrink)

A reassessment of Watsuji Tetsurō is undertaken by bringing his changing view of the importance of Francis Bacon to bear on his understanding of the role of "rationality" in Japanese life. This reflection will enable an exploration of the relevance of the modernity / postmodernity distinction for modern Japanese philosophy.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Unconventional Guest: Masao Abe’s Dialogue with the American AcademyWilliam R. LaFleurDuring the two years we were together at Princeton I once took Masao Abe to meet my parents, then alive and living in New Jersey. I had told them some things in advance about Abe, about Zen, and about what in Abe’s ways could at times be unconventional. My mother, I knew, would put lots of effort into preparing (...) the Sunday dinner we ate on the day of our visit. At the meal’s conclusion Abe turned to my mother and declared: “Mrs. LaFleur, this meal has been simply outrageous! ” For a moment I thought he might have meant “delicious” and had landed on the wrong word. But then I saw his smiling eyes and mouth. He had meant what he said. Everyone laughed and my mother promptly thanked him for his “compliment.”Being at times a genially unconventional guest, one who also in academic or dialogic contexts would say surprising or even unsettling things, was something at which Abe excelled. He was also unconventional in his teaching. He frustrated us when we expected the usual approach. In the book edited by Donald Mitchell I told how in 1969 at the University of Chicago Abe aggravated those of us graduate students who wanted to do a survey of all of modern Japanese philosophy; Abe forced us to stay with certain sentences in Nishida, wanting our minds to be changed. He would not budge.1Some years later at Princeton he proved to be maddeningly insistent on this. Reading The Platform Sutra of the Sixth Patriarch with graduate students in 1977 who knew some Chinese and Japanese was not for Professor Abe going to be exercise in the usual historico-textual excavation; all that was available, he said, in the introduction and notes to Philip Yampolsky’s translation of that text. He was not interested in an “objectification” that put distance between the voice speaking through the text and the person being addressed by it today. For him the ancient text must read as if written for us and for us today. With Abe as teacher the dialogic mode of the seminar room had to replicate in its own way the lecture hall of the Ta-fan Temple! But graduate students at Princeton, inured as they were to the conventional mode of textual-historical analysis, were made clearly uncomfortable by this. Therefore, hoping I might serve as a mediator, they asked me to ask Abe if we might be more historical and move on more quickly. When, with some trepidation, I transmitted this request [End Page 127] to Abe, he merely chuckled and smiled, leaving me to guess why we should expect no change in his emphasis. What follows is my attempt to unpack what was involved in this... and why it remains relevant today.Even some more recent scholars of East Asian Buddhism in our academy today resemble those graduate students back then in Princeton. They, too, have been suggesting that there was something “behind the times” or in need of being updated in the dialogic teaching mode used so brilliantly by Abe—as well as by Hisamatsu Shin’ichi and D. T. Suzuki. However, there is, I think, something both laughably conventional and arrogantly neocolonialist in these critics’ assumptions. They believe that textual and historicist methods (of which Ideologiekritik is an extension) remain something that the West still needs to teach to the non-West, that these render all other methods outdated and irrelevant, and that they can be deployed to expose what remains flawed in the way that, for instance, Japanese such as Abe study and teach Buddhism and Zen.Ironically, this presumptuous stance itself crumbles under historical and textual analysis—at least when applied to Japan. In various studies, Michael Pye has shown that Tominaga Nakamoto’s studies of Buddhist texts, historical and critical to the core, were done in the early seventeenth century and show a solid tradition of scholarship in this mode arising there without any influence from Europe. As Pye shows, interest in the plurality of religions and an early stage of a “science of religions” were present in Japan... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Reconfiguring Modernity: Concepts of Nature in Japanese Political IdeologyWilliam R. LaFleurReconfiguring Modernity: Concepts of Nature in Japanese Political Ideology. By Julia Adeney Thomas. Berkeley, Los Angeles, and London: University of California Press, 2001. Pp. xvi + 225.Books written by persons who self-identify as intellectual historians usually lend themselves more easily to review in history journals than in those that focus on philosophy. Reconfiguring Modernity: Concepts of Nature in (...) Japanese Political Ideology, Julia Adeney Thomas' study of certain Meiji period thinkers is such a book. In 2002 it was awarded the John K. Fairbank Prize in history. Taking a cue to step into her topic from an early essay by Robert Bellah, one in which he had written that "the concern for nature has been a pervasive one in much of modern Japanese thought,"1 Thomas specifies her own search: "It is now time to recover the historical mutability of that concept, and to describe precisely its politics at particular moments in Japan's confrontation with modernity, both within the dominant ideology of the moment and with the alternatives to it" (pp. 30-31).Thomas is among those American students of Japan apparently trained to challenge the massive amounts of excavational scholarship and mile-high reputations of Japanese scholars of Japan. She picks arguments with some of the most highly respected Japanese minds of the twentieth century: the late Maruyama Masao, the late Ienaga Saburō, and Matsumoto Sannosuke.Although Thomas' criticisms tend to focus on those portions of the works of these prolific scholars that have been translated into English,2 some of her criticisms are certainly interesting and possibly valid. For instance, Maruyama, "who repeatedly excoriated Japan's reliance on the political authority of nature (shizen) " (p. 16), envisioned modernity, surely desirable, as involving a move "against Chu Hsi Confucianism"—that is, "an inevitable turning away from nature (shizen) to invention (sakui)" (p. 17). Nevertheless, Maruyama's hero, Ogyū Sorai (1666-1728), had understood "the narrative of modernity" but, tragically, stepped "back from invention at the critical moment, unable, it would seem, to embrace it as the culmination of the historical process" (p. 19).Thomas, rightly I think, indicates that most left and liberal thinkers in Europe and America in the early and mid-twentieth century were skeptical of an invocation of the "natural" in the making of political theory.3 However, she stakes a claim to being part of a different generation, one that rejects the old binary opposition between nature and culture—as well as the further assumption that Western political thinking had successfully disengaged itself from invoking the category of what is natural. Taking a cue from Stephen Toulmin's demonstration of how many of Europe's modernizers embraced and used, rather than rejected, concepts of nature,4 Thomas claims that, at least for us who now live "'on the far side of modernity,' nature can be seen [End Page 172] as multivalent rather than the antonym in a series of binary opposites." In practice this means that for us now, "nature can no longer appear synonymous with the anti-modern, the past, the oppressive, or the Orient" (p. 25).I ask that the reader highlight the sentences above. They constitute what in my view is the most important and by far the most interesting move made in Refiguring Modernity. I will return to them below. First, however, I will recapitulate the progression of the book's chapters. They move in the pattern of linear history. The first, discussed already and titled "The Trouble with Nature," introduces the problem. The second, "The Topographical Imagination of Tokugawa Politics," deals with thinkers of the Tokugawa (Edo) period (1600-1868). Theirs was an era during which, although Chinese claims to being both topographically and morally central had long been dutifully accepted in Japan, strong-thinking Japanese argued that China's frequent dynastic changes demonstrated that "centralness need not be possessed physically to be enacted morally" (p. 42). By outdoing contemporaneous Chinese in terms of being Confucian, Neo-Confucian, or whatever it was that had its origins in China, Japanese and in some sense Japan as a whole were imagined to be the "real China."5... (shrink)