Bioethics between Imaginary and Reality: Tracing Science Fiction and Its Shaping of Transplant Medicine Protocols in Japan

Abstract

By extending the late Osamu Kanamori’s notion of science fiction (sci-fi) as it “re-articulate[s] various issues that bioethical studies had formally discussed,” this paper provides a cultural analysis of Japanese sci-fi stories from the 1990s with reference to the exchange of body parts. By focusing on the time when organ transplantation from brain-dead donors was part of many intensive debates, this paper pays particular attention to the fictional representations of humanity, which feature body-part exchanges between the living and the dead, in genres ranging from Noh 能 dramas to manga 漫画. In this paper I shed light on two issues: (1) how sci-fi representations described the matter of humanity vis-à-vis exchanging parts of the body, and (2) in what ways and on what terms bioethical discourses relating to Japanese organ transplant medicine from brain-dead donors were rearticulated through these sci-fi narratives. I also argue that such rearticulated values were inscribed in the process of constructing the bioethical code of practice in transplant medicine and deathbed care that took place during the late 1990s. By doing so, this paper confirms the role that sci-fi plays in bioethical imaginations, as Kanamori has pointed out and as can also be seen in East Asian societies like Japan.

• organ transplantation
• science fiction
• Japan
• brain death
• representation
• gift economy
• tradition
• culture

Notes

¹ Tsukahara (2016), for instance, provides critical reflection over this development process.

² See, for instance, Kanamori’s participation, with other prominent Japanese scholars, in a press conference held on 12 May 2011 with regard to STS and bioethics; it was intended to criticize the amendment of the Organ Transplantation Act 1997 to the Act of 2011.

³ The Act of 1997 has now been amended into the Organ Transplantation Act of 2011. As a result, the legal notion of brain death as “the interim period between life and death” would not now be applied fully for transplant medicine; meanwhile, the legal interpretation of brain death as the end of human life was also not fully adopted by the Act of 2011. Nonetheless, it again endorses the right for thy death and the bioethical protocol for such deathbed care. Thus, the influence of thy death and the sci-fi motif is arguably applicable to the Act of 2011. Because this matter is beyond the scope of this article, I do not consider it further here.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Kaori Sasaki

Kaori Sasaki is an associate professor at Otaru University of Commerce after working as a research associate at Imperial College London, where she participated in a research project concerning the public understanding of electronic patient records in the United Kingdom. Obtaining Japanese public funding, she has been exploring the development of biopolitics and cultural politics vis-à-vis the current expansion of the usage of electronic health records in Japan. Her postdoctoral and PhD research covered Japanese public debates over the new definition of death and organ transplantation from brain-dead donors.