Final Days: Japanese Culture and Choice at the End of Life

Final Days: Japanese Culture and Choice at the End of Life

Susan Long - Professor of Anthropology, John Caroll University

Wednesday, December 13, 2006 - 4:30pm to 6:00pm
Room 1, Department of Anthropology See map
51 Hillhouse Avenue
New Haven, CT 6511

This presentation explores the last stage of life in Japan, a society characterized by both the practice of high tech medicine and the locating of selfhood in social context. Common to other postindustrial societies, contemporary Japan offers and expects people to make choices to define who they are as individuals, including choices about how to die. But “dying one’s own way” in Japan does not always incorporate the sort of autonomous decision making that defines dying well in American and western European bioethics.

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Japan