Where should future Japanese bioethics go?
So far I have examined some of the recent topics concerning the Japanese patients’ rights movement, and the cultural factor arguments that seem to have prevailed in Japanese bioethics discourses. In this section I discuss further these topics by distinguishing the level of “phenomenon” and that of “discourse.” First, let us look at the phenomena. As for patients’ rights movement, Japanese paternalistic medical customs are gradually changing. Physicians themselves have come to use the words “informed consent” and “patients rights” more frequently than before. However, it is also true that the majority still hesitates the total truth-telling to the patients, especially in the case of cancer. As I have already noted, only 20% of the physicians said they told the truth to their cancer patients in 1992. Recent studies by Naoko Miyaji, an anthropologist, show that the most frequent responses from the physicians she interviewed were where the physicians themselves wanted to know the truth but
