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Parental grief and cultural differences: The case of a brain dead daughter in Japan Professor Masahiro Morioka, Waseda University, Tokyo
Event details
Grief Project Lecture
How parents grieve for their lost child varies from country to country. In 1999, a 17-year-old Japanese high school girl was left clinically brain dead in a car accident. She had a donor card, but her parents did not believe that brain death was human death. They went through hell on earth but finally gave their consent for organ donation. Surprisingly, their daughter had made a promise to her parents before she signed her donor card saying that she would come back to them in a strange way. Masahiro would like to show what kind of view of life and death was behind their promise and how it worked to reunite the family in a tragic way.
About the speaker
Masahiro Morioka teaches philosophy and ethics at Waseda University, Tokyo. His research topics include philosophy of life, bioethics, philosophy of life’s meaning, metaphysics, and criticism of contemporary civilization. The majority of his work has been published in Japanese. His translated books include: Manga Introduction to Philosophy (2013), Painless Civilization: A Critique of Desire (Chapter One, 2003), and Confessions of a Frigid Man: A Philosopher’s Journey into the Hidden Layers of Men’s Sexuality (2005), which are all downloadable from the Internet as open access books. He is the editor-in-chief of the Journal of Philosophy of Life, and a Steering Committee member of the International Conference on Philosophy and Meaning in Life.