Chapitre 10. “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.