Abstract
Nakatani Kinko is an expert on criminal law. In 1970, she writes, she attended a legal-issues conference in West Germany. It became the catalyst for her deepened interest in abortion law. This was because she was shocked to hear Western scholars debating at great length about the exact day of the soul’s entry into the fetus according to Christian doctrine—and how pinpointing that event seemed somehow crucial to the whole matter. She writes, ‘For me as a Japanese involved in the study of criminal law the debate conducted within this framework of thought seemed beyond belief. I fully realized at that point that when it comes to abortion the history and way of thinking of us Japanese and the people of the West is very, very different’.2
This chapter has been adapted from the author’s book Liquid Life: Abortion and Buddhism in Japan. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992). The book deals not only with present practice but with large amount of historical material which has shaped contemporary attitudes and practice. The historical material has been omitted here for reasons of space.
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Notes
Nakatani Kinko, ‘Chūzetsu dataizai no toraekata’ in Nihon kazoku keikaku renmei, ed., Onna no jinken to sei: watakushitachi no sentaku (Komichi Shobō, 1984), 29.
Takie Sugiyama Lebra, Japanese Patterns of Behavior (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1976), 11.
Richard Rorty in recent years has been the most articulate advocate of a reappropriation of the American pragmatists, especially in his Consequences of Pragmatism (Essays: 1972–1980) (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1982)
and Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989).
Stout, Jeffrey. Ethics after Babel: The Languages of Morals and their Discontents (Boston: Beacon Press, 1988).
For a similar assessment of Buddhism and Pragmatism, see Kenneth K. Inada and Nolan P. Jacobson, Buddhism and American Thinkers (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1984), esp. 76.
William Safire, perhaps in this instance more ‘Japanese’ than he realized, advocated the pragmatics of compromise in his ‘Option 3: “Pro-Comp”’, New York Times, July 6, 1989.
See essays in Sakurai Tokutar, ed., Jizō Shinkō (Yūzankaku Shuppan, 1983);
Ishida Mizumaro, Jigoku (Kyoto: Hōzōkan, 1985), 236–54;
Takahashi Bonsen, Nihon jinkō-shi no kenkyū, Sanyūsha, 1941–1962, 348.
Original text is Aoki Kazuo et al. eds., the Nihon shisō taikei: Kojiki (Iwanami Shoten, 1982), 23.
Iwai Hiroshi, ‘Nihonjin to mizu no shinsō-shinri’, Risō 614 (July 1984): 89–99, and esp. 93.
Chiba Tokuji and Ōtsu Tadao, Mabiki to mizuko: kosodate no fuōkuroa (Nōsangyōson Bunka Kyōkai, 1983), esp. 31–38.
On Kaimyō and ancestral rites as a way of putting distance between deceased ancestors and the living, see Robert J. Smith, Ancestor Worship in Contemporary Japan (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1974).
Helen Hardacre, Kurozumikyō and the New Religions of Japan (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1986), 151.
See Hashimoto Mitsuru, ‘Fuan no shakai ni motomeru shūkyō: mizuko kuyō’, Gendai shakai-gaku 13:1 (1987): 42.
Shundo Tachibana, The Ethics of Buddhism (London: Curzon Press, 1926), 81.
An especially strong censure from within was Watanabe Shōkō, in his Nihon no bukkyō (Iwanami Shoten, 1958).
Robert Nisbet, entry on ‘Abortion’, in his Prejudices: A Philosophical Dictionary (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1982), 1.
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LaFleur, W.R. (1998). Abortion in Japan: Towards a ‘Middle Way’ for the West?. In: Keown, D. (eds) Buddhism and Abortion. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-14178-4_5
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