title: "Death with dignity" in the Japanese context.
abstract: In Japan, "death with dignity" is a widely known term that is distinguished from "euthanasia." It is generally defined as "the act of letting a terminally ill or a patient in a persistent vegetative state die by withdrawing life-sustaining treatment on request in the form of a living will." Most Japanese people consider death with dignity a desirable way of terminating one's life and it is therefore acceptable as a "natural death" or "humane death." Originally, death with dignity was regarded as a passive intervention, but since the 1990s, its connotations have changed in western countries; people claim that voluntary active euthanasia and physician-assisted suicide should be legalized as death with dignity or the "right to die." In this paper, I examine the points and problems of this new type of death with dignity and propose an alternative version of death with dignity especially for the Japanese context, i.e. the end-of-life care process in support of terminal living with dignity.
authors.affiliation: Osaka University Graduate School of Medicine, Department of Medical Ethics, Japan.
authors.forename: Motomu
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Shimoda
mesh_terms: D003256:Community Participation; D033101:Euthanasia, Active, Voluntary; D005190:Family; D006801:Humans; D007564:Japan; D008020:Life Support Care; D026684:Personal Autonomy; D011639:Public Opinion; D011640:Public Policy; D012297:Right to Die; D017236:Suicide, Assisted; D013727:Terminal Care; D016312:Treatment Refusal; D019366:Western World; D028761:Withholding Treatment