The Ritual of Rights in Japan: Law, Society, and Health Policy

by Eric A. Feldman

• ISBN13: 9780521779647
• ISBN10: 0521779642
• Edition: 1st
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2000-04-13
• Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Summary

The Ritual of Rights in Japan challenges the conventional wisdom that the assertion of rights is fundamentally incompatible with Japanese legal, political and social norms. It discusses the creation of a Japanese translation of the word 'rights', Kenri; examines the historical record for words and concepts similar to 'rights'; and highlights the move towards recognising patients' rights in the 1960s and 1970s. Two policy studies are central to the book. One concentrates on Japan's 1989 AIDS Prevention Act, and the other examines the protracted controversy over whether brain death should become a legal definition of death. Rejecting conventional accounts that recourse to rights is less important to resolving disputes than other cultural forms,The Ritual of Rights in Japan uses these contemporary cases to argue that the invocation of rights is a critical aspect of how conflicts are articulated and resolved.

Table of Contents

Preface	ix
Acknowledgments	xii
Reconsidering rights in Japanese law and society	1	(15)
Rights in Japanese history	16	(22)
The roots of ``rights''	16	(4)
Rights before kenri: early antecedents	20	(2)
Rights, protest, and rebellion in Tokugawa Japan	22	(5)
The Movement for Freedom and Popular Rights	27	(4)
State power and the control of rights	31	(7)
Patients, rights, and protest in contemporary Japan	38	(15)
``New rights'' movements and traditional social protest	38	(1)
Studying the ``New rights''	39	(4)
Patients, rights as ``new rights'': conceptualization, litigation, legislation	43	(7)
Law, rights, and policy in contemporary Japan: two narratives	50	(3)
AIDS policy and the politics of rights	53	(29)
AIDS, public health, and individual rights	53	(2)
An epidemiological view	55	(1)
Hemophiliacs and gay men: rights, risks, and repression	56	(2)
Proposal, debate, and enactment of the AIDS prevention law	58	(14)
AIDS, activism, and accommodation	72	(10)
Asserting rights, legislating death	82	(28)
Rights, brain death, and organ transplantation	82	(3)
Death, culture, and body parts	85	(7)
Scientific, legal, medical, and political attempts to define death	92	(6)
Power politics and body politics: the Ad-Hoc Committee for the Study of Brain and Organ Transplantation	98	(10)
A tentative truce in the fight over death	108	(2)
Litigation and the courts: talking about rights	110	(31)
Rights and the legal process	110	(2)
AIDS: crisis, compensation, and the courts	112	(18)
Brain death and organ transplantation:accusation and discretion	130	(11)
A sociolegal perspective on rights in Japan	141	(25)
Rights, modernization, and the ``uniqueness'' of the Japanese legal system	141	(4)
Rights and the metaphor of legal transplants	145	(3)
Legal culture, legal institutions, and Japanese law	148	(15)
Conclusion	163	(3)
Notes	166	(32)
Bibliography	198	(16)
Index	214