Dehistoricizing history: The ethical dilemma of "East Asian bioethics"

Critical Asian Studies

Volumn 37, Issue 2, 2005, Pages 233-250

  Robertson, Jennifer ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN   (United States)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

CULTURAL INFLUENCE; ETHICS;

ASIA; EASTERN HEMISPHERE; EURASIA; FAR EAST; WORLD;

EID: 20544445161     PISSN: 14672715     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1080/14672710500106309     Document Type: Article

References (91)

1. Van Potter, Bioethics: The Bridge to the Future (New York: Prentice-Hall, 1971).
2. Albert Jonsen, "Introduction to the History of Bioethics," in Bioethics: An Introduction to the History, Methods and Practice, ed, Nancy Jecker, Albert Jonsen, and Robert Perlman (Boston: Jones and Bartlett Publishers, 1997), 9.
3. Maura Ryan, "Beyond a Western Bioethics?" Theological Studies 65, no. 1 (2004): 158-77.
4. Kajikawa Kin-Ichiro, "Japan: A New Field Emerges," The Hastings Center Report 19, no. 4 (1989): 29-30.
5. Yonemoto Shohei, Baioeshikkusu [Bioethics] (Tokyo: Kodansha, 1985).
6. URL: http://www.l.utokyo.ac.jp/shiseigaku/ coe_eng_seika.html#journal.
7. Nukaga Yoshio, "Tracing the Birth of Bioethics in Japan," CGP NewsOnline 2, no. 4 (2004);
8. see also Akabayashi, Akira and Brian T. Slingsby, "Biomedical Ethics in Japan: The Second Stage," Cambridge Quarterly of Healthcare Ethics 12 (2003): 261-64.
9. URL: http://www.lifestudies.org.
10. Although he does not identify himself as a Japan scholar, Darryl Macer has virtually monopolized to date the Anglophone literature on "Japanese bioethics," almost all of which is published by the Eubios Ethics Institute he founded in 1990 at Tsukuba University.
11. Medical ethics were codified in 1951. There is now a huge literature on the brain death versus heart death debates in Japan. A comparative, comprehensive, and compelling overview and analysis of the debates can be found in Margaret Lock, Organ Transplants and the Reinvention of Death (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2002). Curiously, there is no entry for "bioethics" in the index although references to "ethics" appear here and there in the book.
12. Renee C. Fox and Judith P. Swazey, "Leaving the Field," The Hastings Center Report 22, no. 5 (1992): 9;
13. and "Medical Morality Is Not Bioethics: Medical Ethics in China and the United States," Perspectives in Biology and Medicine 273 (1984): 336-60, at 360.
14. Although the word "bioethics" itself maybe of recent vintage, I share with historian Tina Stevens the perspective that bioethics is actually the product of a much longer history. Stevens argues that in the United States, bioethics is the most recent product of "a centuries-long cultural legacy of American ambivalence toward progress" and that its modern roots lie in the "responsible science movement" occasioned by the development of nuclear weapons. See M.L. Tina Stevens, Bioethics in America: Origins and Cultural Politics (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2000).
15. Ikeda Shigenori, "Hi no shita ni atarashiki mono nashi" (There's nothing new under the sun), Yūsei Undō 3, no. 3 (1928): 18-27;
16. Fujino Yutaka, Nihon fuashizumu to yūsei shisō (Japanese fascism and eugenic thought) (Kyoto: Kamogawa Shuppan, 1998), 83-86;
17. Okada Sadako, "Atarashii oyakusho" (A new government office), Kaizō 6 (1933): 86-91.
18. Jennifer Robertson, "Japan's First Cyborg? Miss Nippon, Eugenics, and Wartime Technologies of Beauty, Body, and Blood," Body and Society 7, no. 1 (2001): 1-34;
19. Jennifer Robertson, "Blood Talks: Eugenic Modernity and the Creation of New Japanese," History and Anthropology 13, no. 3 (2002): 191-216.
20. Julian Savulescu, "Procreative Beneficence: Why We Should Select the Best Children," Bioethics 15, no. 5-6 (2001): 413-26.
21. Robertson, "Blood Talks."
22. Robert Baker, "Bioethics and History," no date given. On-line at http://www.bioethics.upenn.edu/faculty/pubs/baker.pdf, pp. 2 and 7, of forty pages.
23. Also published in the Journal of Medicine and Philosophy 27, no. 4 (2002): 447-74.
24. Ibid., 31 (pdf).
25. Ibid., 25-26.
26. Ibid., 2.
27. See Martin S. Pernick, "On the Relationship Between Bioethics and History," chap. 2, in A History of Medical Ethics, ed. Laurence McCullough and Robert Baker (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004).
28. Ibid., 2.
29. I discuss Sakamoto's ideas later in this article. See also Hattori Keni, "East Asian Family and Biomedical Ethics," in Asian Bioethics in the Twenty-first Century, ed. Song Sang-yong, Koo Young-Mo, and Darryl R.J. Macer (Christchurch: Eubios Ethics Institute, 2003), 229-231;
30. and Frank Leavitt, "The international Impact of Asian Bioethics," in Song et al., Asian Bioethics, 224-28. Hattori is a physician based at Gunma University and Leavitt is on the faculty of Ben Gurion University.
31. Matsunaga Ei, "Birth Control Policy in Japan: A Review from Eugenic Standpoint [sic]," Japanese Journal of Human Genetics 13, no. 3 (1968):189-200, at 199 and 189. Plus note 5: Throughout this article, Matsunaga uses the term "eugenics" without qualms or qualification. His non-Japanese peers would not be and have not been so forthright. "Eugenics" is a word freighted with horrific connotations as a result of abuses not only by the Nazis but by the governments of many other countries, including the United States, where involuntary sterilization had been carried out since 1906 on people deemed "unfit." Of course, one could also say that whereas Matsunaga was forthright, some of his non-Japanese peers have been euphemistic, using in place of "eugenics" terms such as "procreative beneficence" (see Savulescu, "Procreative Beneficence."). A "clandestine second wave of eugenic practices" continues today in the guise of increasingly taken-for-granted biotechnologies. Genetic testing, gene-mapping, prenatal screening, selective (e.g., sex-specific) abortion, technologically assisted or enabled reproduction, pre-implantation genetic diagnosis, and surrogacy, are all "health" services and commodities offered in countries around the world, including Japan, under the authority of the state and legitimate medical institutions.
32. Briefly, the overarching purpose of the 1940 law was to insure the betterment of the Japanese ethnic nation (minzoku) by preventing the reproduction (through sterilization) of people with a hereditary disease, and by promoting the reproduction of genetically healthy people. "Unfit" was an ambiguous term that included sterility, mental illness, alcoholism, feeblemindedness, physical deformities, disabilities, dementia, deaf-mutism, myopia and blindness, so-called deviant sexuality, and proneness to tuberculosis, syphilis, and criminal behavior. Obviously, not all of these conditions are inherited, and those that are may be hidden in "normal-looking" carriers. Finally, a key ideological component of the early Japanese eugenics movement was the reproduction of so-called pure-blooded (junketsu) Japanese, and, accordingly, Japanese eugenics in general was anti-miscegenationist. See Robertson, "Japan's First Cyborg,"
33. Robertson, "Blood Talks."
34. Born in January 1892 in Nikaho town (Yuri district, Akita prefecture), Ikeda Shigenori attended college in Tokyo. Following his graduation from Tokyo Foreign Language University (Tokyo Gaigodai), he was employed by Kōdansha, a prominent publishing house, to edit the magazine Taikan (Outlook). He later joined the Hōchi Shinbun, a major daily newspaper, and served as a special correspondent to Germany from 1919 to 1924, where he earned doctorates in eugenics and women's history. He was transferred to Moscow in 1925 before returning to Japan and founding Yūsei Undō (Eugenic Exercise/Movement Association) and a eugenics journal (of the same name), both of which aimed to foster among the general public an interest in incorporating hygienic and eugenic practices into everyday life practices. The journal ceased publication in January 1930. Ikeda rekindled his journalism career the following year by assuming the editorship of the Keijō Nippō (Seoul Daily News), based in Seoul. He returned to the Hōchi Shinbun as an editor in 1938, and from 1941 through the end of the war worked for Naval Intelligence (Kaigun hōdōbu). After the war he became a prominent "social commentator" (hyōronka), known for his entertaining essays on a wide array of topics, from the origins of both sushi and Japanese photography, to canine welfare in different cultures and the fate of Japanese konketsuji ("mixed-blood children"). Ikeda Shigenori, Ikite yakutatsu hanashi no mimibukuro (An earful of stories useful for living) (Tokyo: Hokushindō, 1956);
35. Ikeda Shigenori, Ikite yakutatsu hanashi no mimibukuro - Zoku (An earful of stories useful for living - continuation) (Tokyo: Hokushindō, 1957). He passed away in 1966.
36. Ikeda, "Hi no shita ni atarashiki mono nashi," 26.
37. See Robertson, "Blood Talks."
38. Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger, The Invention of Tradition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992).
39. Nicholas Thomas, Out of Time: History and Evolution in Anthropological Discourse (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989).
40. Renewal was also conceptualized according to a sexual division of labor: males in short hair and suits were to represent the modern, forward-looking "new japan," while females in chignons and kimono were to represent "tradition" (itself a modern product) and, in this way, serve as a living benchmark for the new nation-state's modernity and progress.
41. Note that "Japanese tradition" was invented in the Meiji period (1868-1912) to serve as a foil for establishing "newness" and modernity. See Carol Gluck, Japan's Modern Myths: Ideology in the Late Meiji Period (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1985)
42. Jennifer Robertson, "Empire of Nostalgia: Rethinking 'Internationalization' in Japan Today," Theory, Culture and Society 14, no. 4 (1997): 97-122.
43. Gavan McCormack, "The Japanese Movement to 'Correct' History," in Censoring History: Citizenship and Memory in Japan, Germany, and the United States, ed. Laura Hein and Mark Selden (Armonk, N.Y.: M.E. Sharpe, 2000), 53-73;
44. Aaron Gerow, "Consuming Asia, Consuming Japan: The New Neonationalistic Revisionism in Japan," in Hein and Selden, eds., Censoring History, 74-95.
45. James Bartholomew, The Formation of Science in Japan: Building a Research Tradition (New Haven: Yale University Presss, 1989), 4.
46. "Kagaku" in Kōjien, ed., Shinmura Izuru (Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten, 1978), 371.
47. Nakada Senpo, "Narachō jidai ni okeru kekkon (9)" (Marriage in the period of the Nara court), Yūsei Undō (Eugenic Exercise/ Movement) 4, no. 11 (1929): 107-109. Note: "dōsei wa metorazu" was an admonition in the Analects of Confucius.
48. Robertson, "Blood Talks," 198-202.
49. Nakada, "Narachō jidai ni okeru kekkon (9)," 108.
50. "Kamakura jidai ni arawaretaru yūseigakuteki jijitsu" (Eugenic truths evident in the Kamakura period), Yūsei Undō (Eugenic Exercise/Movement) 2, no. 2 (1927): 21.
51. "Kamakura jidai ni arawaretaru yūseigakuteki jijitsu" (Eugenic truths evident in the Kamakura period), Yūseigaku (Eugenics) 144 (1936): 21.
52. Watanabe Kazuo, "Ikeda Ringi (Shigenori)," in Akita Daihyakka Jiten, ed. Akita Kaishinpōsha (Akita: Akita Kaishinpōsha, 1981).
53. Sabine Frühstück, Colonizing Sex: Sexology and Social Control in Modern Japan (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2003), 213, n. 27.
54. Robertson, Takarazuka,
55. Robertson, "Blood Talks."
56. I am referring here to a theoretical approach to history known as "cognitive realism," or a tacit assumption that there exists an actual historical reality beyond our senses about which we can obtain increased knowledge through assiduous research. Cognitive realism is not to be confused with "naïve realism," which assumes a past reality that is directly reflected in already available sources and narratives. See Mats Lindqvist, "Between Realism and Relativism: A Consideration of History in Modern Ethnology," Ethnologia Scandinavica 22 (1992): 3-16, at 6.
57. John Dower, War Without Mercy: Race and Power in the Pacific War (New York: Pantheon Books, 1985), 178-79.
58. Harry Harootunian, Overcome by Modernity: History, Culture, and Community in Interwar Japan (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2000), 34-94.
59. John Dower, Embracing Defeat: Japan in the Wake of World War II (New York: The New Press, 1999), 179, 584, n 18.
60. Emperor Jimmu was the first mythological emperor of Japan (660-585 BCE) and mythological founder of the present imperial family. The Mission of Divine Japan and the Resolve of the Japanese People, 1943, cited in Maruyama Masao, Thought and Behavior in Modern Japanese Politics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1979), 21.
61. cited in Maruyama Masao, Thought and Behavior in Modern Japanese Politics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1979), 21.
62. Obviously, evoking the coevality of past and present is not a practice monopolized by the Japanese alone; as one reviewer quite aptly pointed out, religious doctrines in particular exploit this "logic." My use of "uniformitarianism" is adopted from the geological concept of the same name, which states that existing processes acting in the same manner as at present are sufficient to account for all geological changes.
63. In his essay, "The Principles of Montage," Russian filmmaker Lev Vladimirovich Kuleshov, who was one of the first to develop a theory of montage, argues that "[t]he interaction of separate montage segments, their position, and likewise their rhythmic duration, become the contents of the production and the world view of the artist. The very same action, the very same event, set in different places with different comparisons, 'works' differently ideologically." See Lev Kuleshov, Kuleshov on Film Ronald Levaco, trans. (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1974), 194.
64. See also Robertson, Takarazuka, chap. 3, for a discussion of montage as historical epistemology.
65. In this connection I was intrigued to find that the "history" page of the website for the National Genetics Institute of Japan is a timeline that begins with the establishment of the Institute in April 1949.
66. Jennifer Robertson, "Eugenical Phantasms: Embellishments and Erasures in Japanese Science History," paper presented at the annual meeting of the Association for Asian Studies, New York, 28 March 2003, on the panel organized by Jennifer Robertson, "Tropics of History: Genealogical Forces and Fictions in East Asia."
67. See also Yamaguchi Tomomi, "Feminism as Chronology: The Place of Timelines (nenpyō) in Women's History," paper presented at the annual meeting of the Association for Asian Studies, New York, 28 March 2003, on the panel organized by Jennifer Robertson, "Tropics of History: Genealogical Forces and Fictions in East Asia."
68. Sakamoto Hyakudai, "New Initiatives in East Asian Bioethics. "Eubios Journal of Asian and International Bioethics 5, no. 2 (1995): 30;
69. and Sakamoto Hyakudai, "Foundations of East Asian Bioethics," Eubios Journal of Asian and International Bioethics 6 (1996): 31-32.
70. This tract was supplemented by two later Education Ministry publications, "The Way of the Subject" (Shinmin no michi, 1941) and the "Cardinal Guiding Principles of Wartime Family Education" (Senji katei kyōiku shidō yōkō, 1942). See Dower, War Without Mercy, 280.
71. Joyce Lebra, ed., Japan's Great East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere in World War II (Kuala Lumpur: Oxford University Press, 1975).
72. Dower, War Without Mercy, 281.
73. Shinmei Masamichi, "East Asia Cooperative Body," in Lebra, ed., Japan's Great East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere, 14-19.
74. Sakamoto Hyakudai, "Genome, Artificial Evolution, and Global Communitarianism," The Annals of the Japan Association for the Philosophy of Science 10, no. 4 (2002): 35, 45.
75. Ibid., 45.
76. I b i d.
77. For examples of invented traditions in Japan see Stephen Vlastos, ed., Mirror of Modernity: Invented Traditions in Modern Japan (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1998).
78. As Leonardo de Castro remarks in a 1999 article in Bioethics in which he gently rebuts Sakamoto's notion of "East Asian bioethics" we must accept that there is no Asian bioethics that would cover the entire range of Asian countries... we must guard against the homogenizing tendencies of bioethical discourse declaring faith in an Asian identity." (Leonardo de Castro, "Is There an Asian Bioethics?" Bioethics 13, no. 3/4 (1999): 232. At the fifth Asian Bioethics Conference annual meeting (14-15 February 2004, Tsukuba University, Japan), I invited Professor Sakamoto to clarify his concept of "holistic paternalism" in conjunction with "East Asian bioethics" but he refused to respond.
79. Laura Hein and Ellen H. Hammond, "Homing in on Asia: Identity in Contemporary Japan," Bulletin of Concerned Asian Scholars 27, no. 3 (1995): 3, 5.
80. Ibid., 5.
81. Similarly, historian M.L. Tina Stevens delineates the role of bioethics in protecting corporate interests in the United States. See Stevens, Bioethics in America.
82. Robertson, Takarazuka, 99;
83. see also Edward Said, Orientalism (New York: Vintage Books, 1979 [1978]), 55.
84. See, among others, Aijaz Ahmad, "Jameson's Rhetoric of Otherness and the 'National Allegory,"' Social Text 15 (1986): 65-88;
85. Gerhold Becker, "Asian and Western Ethics: Some Remarks on a Productive Tension," Eubios Journal of Asian and International Bioethics 5 (1995): 31-33;
86. Robertson, Takarazuka;
87. Ryan, "Beyond a Western Bioethics?")
88. Tsuchiya Takashi, "Why Japanese Doctors Performed Human Experiments in China, 1933-1945," Eubios Journal of Asian and International Bioethics 10 (2000): 179-180.
89. Hamano Kenzo, "Human Rights and Japanese Bioethics," Bioethics 11, no. 3 (1997): 328-35.
90. Sakamoto, "Genome," 44.
91. Stevens, Bioethics in America, 158.