Hospice Care and Culture by Teresa Chikako Maruyama

Author:Teresa Chikako Maruyama [Maruyama, Teresa Chikako]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781138317482
Google: DWpPugEACAAJ
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Publisher: Taylor & Francis
Published: 2018-08-09T00:00:00+00:00

Attitudes to Death and Dying, and the Hospice Movement in a Comparison between the West and Japan

In the first section of this chapter, we have made a comparison between the Western and the Japanese attitude to death and dying, and discovered similarities and differences. We will now look at this work together with that on the hospice movement in the West and Japan, which we analyzed Part I of the book, to see how the different attitudes to death and dying are connected with the hospice movement in Japan and the West in order to glimpse what sort of problems Japan may have in attempting to import the Western hospice and its philosophy.

Religious Tradition

We explored in Chapter 5 how the Western hospice has attempted to revive the early Christian attitude to death and dying, in which individuals could prepare for a predicted death, have faith in and hope for resurrection, no strong awareness of the Last Judgment, and see death and bereavement as an event of the whole community. We have also explored the possibility that the modern hospice may create these conditions, by means of a modern ‘pilgrimage’ in order to overcome the fear of death and dying, no longer arising through an awareness of the Last Judgment but from the secularized way of life which regards death as a mere dead line, the modern taboo on emotional issues, the development of medical science, etc. On the other hand, however, we have seen that such a ‘revival’ has only been developed in a sense as part of the problems of hospice care, observing that the public attitude to death and bereavement is still not at all open although there has been great financial support for the hospice movement.

Coming back to the ‘rose’ analogy, we may say that the modern hospice movement may intend to use the ‘scent of roses’, religious values and symbolism, which have remained in the modern secularized Western mind and without an awareness of God’s existence, in order to complete the pilgrim-cancer patient metaphor. In the change of moral values resulting from the secularization of Western life and thought, the ‘scent of roses’ may, as we have seen, only become apparent on special occasions such as funerals, weddings, and crises of people’s lives, but not in the ordinary daily life of the modern period. We suppose that is why it has been necessary to create another world called the ‘hospice’, which by analogy may be described as a ‘greenhouse’, in order to revive the old Christian perspective on death and dying or ‘pilgrimage’ within certain limits under the hospice philosophy.

For the Japanese, ordinary modern life is, compared to the West, full of ‘scent’. That is to say, the scent is not only for special occasions, and this is because people’s day-to-day attitudes to life, death, and human relationships are deeply influenced by religious values though they are not practising traditional religions like Shinto and Buddhism. But the scent comes from different sorts of flowers, for example ‘lilies’, because of its different religious tradition from the Western one.

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