The aim of this paper is to make clear how and to what degree religions are and should be involved in the process by which society accepts or rejects new biomedical technologies. This question needs to be asked because religion contains some general views of the world and of human beings, and because, as seen by the recent resurgence of religion in the world, many people are once again recognizing the great influence religion has on social and individual life. When attempting to make a social consensus concerning the problems of bioethics, it is most important to take into account the pluralistic nature of modern society. Even though society may not become totally non-religious, the possibility that society is determined by a certain specific religion is decreasing, and in the long run this trend is irreversible. In modern society, a variety of morals, whether religious or secular, stand side by side, and therefore are relative to one another. This social tendency is continuing to grow stronger. It is a political principle of modern society that the legislation of bioethical problems must be done at a distance from specific religions. Therefore, in the final analysis, the respect for the individual's autonomy will necessarily be the most crucial principle in modern bioethics.

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This paper is an attempt to explore the possibility of constructing a new bio-ethics from the perspective of the history of religions. First, this article will reexamine the meaning of life and death from contemporary viewpoints of religious studies, and later discuss the possibility of constructing a new bio-ethics with reference to the framework of Toshihiko Izutsu's "Oriental Philosophy." What is fundamentally important in constructing a new bio-ethics is to place the individual being in the context of the whole. As the French historian Philippe Aries pointed out, modern people tend to grasp human life only at the individual level and forget the nature of a human as a mortal being. As Izutsu's discussion about Hua-yen philosophy shows, Oriental thought provides a perspective of human life that is characterized by the inseparability of life and death from the dimensions of deep consciousness. When one recognizes the life of an individual being living in the context of the whole, one can obtain a new horizon of knowledge that the life world as a whole is alive even through the death of an individual. Thus, a possibility toward a new bio-ethics can be found, based upon the viewpoint of "eternal life," "immortality," and "the continuity of life and death."

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The objective of this paper is to elucidate the problematic and the nature of spiritual care as contrasted with terminal care and palliative care. In Japan, spiritual care is often identified with pastoral care. However, it should not be regarded as limited to a particular form of religion, but as a universal matter of human beings. In other words, it should be applicable to anyone in any place at any time. We will investigate spiritual care in terms of spirit and care. As far as care is concerned, at least two points need to be clarified. The first is to determine the basic structure underlying the human relationships of how the self and the other are related to one another. The second is to explore the semantics of pain of sickness and detect its root, that is, to see whether the human relationships are distorted or not among the self, the other, the world, and the transcendent. Pursuing these questions drives us to the dimension of the spirit. The term spirit, derived from the Latin spiritus (breath), has been referred to as both an invisible principle as well as visible phenomenon. Its dual structure of meaning is similar to that of such Japanese equivalents for it as rei (霊), tama (たま), and hi (ひ). What emerges from the etymological analysis of spirit is the problematic of how one should transcend oneself. Giving careful consideration to spiritual care from the above-mentioned perspective, a new human view, but existing from time immemorial, comes into view. Specifically, it is a trichotomy which regards the human being as a whole, or total man, with spirit, mind, and body. This way of looking at the human being will necessarily bring about a drastic change in our way of self-understanding.

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Though the word "spirituality" has been used widely in various disciplines since the 1980s, the definitions and meanings of this word are rather vague, sometimes even contradicting each other. Since this word has various meanings and implications depending on the context in which it is used, we must begin to show who uses this word in what context and clarify their strategies in order to understand the concept more comprehensively. On the basis of some investigation, the users of this word can be classified into three main groups: the professionals engaged in human care, the scholars of religious studies, and the advocates of new age movements. Each group tends to emphasize a different aspect of "spirituality" in each particular context, and pays little attention to the use of the word by other groups. For example, the professionals of the first group, especially the medical professionals, emphasize the aspect of the search for the meaning and the purpose of human life and death, while they do not lay much emphasis on the aspect of the relationship with super-human beings or the transcendent. In this paper, I will bring out the interrelationship among the different meanings of "spirituality," and show the potentialities of the concept in wider context, focusing on the common background in which we need this concept in different contexts as the medium between religion and secularism.

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Cura animarum is the root of all medical practices. Modern medical science, however, has adopted an analytical approach to the local cure of physical diseases, and so the original function of care has barely remained in the fields of clinical psychiatry and psychotherapy. However, these branches have not been able to unify theory and practice. This situation corresponds to the semantic diversity of the word "spirituality." In what follows I would like to unravel the entangled problem. In the modern Weltanschauung the mental is regarded as the most immediate experience. The soul, however, includes all the three dimensions of "mental, physical, and social," and opens to the other and to the world. In order to regain the original openness of the soul, the mental should accept its finite physicality. This enables the mental to open to the other, and the so-far entangled three dimensions will harmonize with each other. The topos where such openness is possible is none other than spirituality, which offers a basis not only to care but also to any specific religion.

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By thinking through the rise and fall of the use of lobotomy, the author would like to think about the meaning of medical technology and the reasons behind the acceptance and avoidance of medical technologies. The possible reasons are considered as the following three factors. The first is the dislike and refusal of medical science to think of the human mind and spirit in the same way as the physical human body. The second is the irreversibility of a procedure. The fact of personality changes that were apparent upon long-term observation became the most important factor leading to the rejection of the use of lobotomy. The third is Muraoka's reference to developments in medicine as "amida kuji" or "the luck of the draw." The advent of antipsychotic drugs led not to a discussion of whether lobotomy was worth keeping or not but instead skipped ahead to the conclusion that lobotomy was no longer necessary. If there is one aspect of the "amida kuji" or "the luck of the draw" that we can rely on it would be that religion, different than medicine or ethics, provides a fruitful perspective on these matters.

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This article focuses on the crimes of Doctors during the Nazi Era. In this article, the author analyzes the motivation and mentality of the Doctors when they committed crimes, and then offers some suggestions. The main crimes performed by the Nazi regime are 1) slaughter of handicapped people under the guise of "euthanasia" (T 4 Program) and 2) annihilation of European Jews (Holocaust). The justification for the former was the purification of "Aryan" blood, and for the latter was extreme racism. Nazi Doctors were deeply involved in both crimes. They performed the selection of victims, and were directly involved in killing, and used inmates for cruel and inhuman medical experiments. Their motivation was mainly a sympathy for Nazism, which insisted on blood purification and racial hygiene. They justified murder, using a medical metaphor. However, in the performance of killing, the psychological mechanism of "Doubling" and "Psychic numbing" was also at work. They were possessed by a crazy philosophy, but they did not go insane. The craziness of Fascism deprived the Doctors of reason. Bioethical education has to begin by facing this most dark period in history, so people will not repeat the same tragedy.

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The distinctiveness of the Korean stem cell fabrication scandal, to be judged as a scientific fraud case, is that more than 2000 ova were donated and thrown away through unethical channels for the false "nuclear transfer of human embryonic stem-cells (NT-hESCs)" studies. In addition to that, the world's leading cloning expert fabricated data on embryonic stem-cell studies. This unprecedented unethical reception of a huge quantity of ova for research purposes in Korean stem-cell studies was caused by a bio-nationalism, which hopes to have Korea jump up the top of the world in bio-technology by succeeding to establish "NT-hESCs," as well as the cultural distinctiveness of "infertility treatment" having supported the rapid development of Korean bio-technology. I will examine the background of the allegations of unethical behavior over ovum donation in the Hwang Woo Suk stem-cell scandal in connection with the context of bio-nationalism and "infertility treatment" in Korea.

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Usually we expect that religion suggests pros and cons with regard to bioethical dilemmas such as organ transplants or embryonic stem cell research. These issues are understood as problems, which emerge along with the development of medical technology and cannot be resolved by conventional schema. It is true that religion traditionally deals with the events of "life, death and medical services." However, in modern society its role is limited to the private area, and we cannot refer to religious ideas as a ground for public decisions. This paper focuses on the role of religion for introducting the idea of welfare into the bioethics discourse. It examines the notion of "welfare" and refers to its original meaning of "taking care of others' life, security and well-being." From this viewpoint welfare is not only social assistance for needy persons, but also a fundamental concept of society. We can find the origin of welfare in Biblical insights about humanity and society. Thus, Genesis contains the fundamental view of respect for human dignity. Moreover, Jubilee (or Shabatts) can be interpreted as a social program which tries to secure and materialize this view. In this context, welfare is understood as a program of symbiosis of community members whose diversity causes a rupture of community. Considering welfare as a program of symbiosis, we can recognize the importance of introducting the idea of welfare into bioethics. It is true that this role can be presented by non-religious discourse. However, in the discussion about the fundamental importance of symbiosis, religion can, for the moment, give us crucial insights. Even if bioethics is based only on human ethics, it could manage to deal with bioethical dilemmas. But the development of biotechnology can undermine symbiosis. In this sense, we need religious insights, which sometimes go beyond human ethics.

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In this paper I discuss what Richard A. McCormick, S. J., thought about the problem of euthanasia. McCormick wrote a number of papers on this theme in the 1970s. By considering these papers, we can consider his fundamental thoughts on this theme, namely that active euthanasia or mercy killing should never be permitted, but passive euthanasia may be permitted under some conditions. He insists that, rejecting the stance of medical vitalism, we should consider problems of passive euthanasia case by case. In doing so we also should, from the viewpoint of Christianity, consider the quality of life that is founded upon human relationships. He makes human relationships his most crucial point in his paper "To Save or Let Die," and later bases it upon whether or not there is some cerebral ability for human relationship. He thinks that this foundation is reasonable, so he allows for passive euthanasia of PVS patients as reasonable, since in such cases the person's cerebral ability is severely damaged. However, doubts remain as to the connection between reasonableness and relationships. McCormick does not doubt the connection between the two, but in fact family relationships often cause people to continue life support even when it is "unreasonable." McCormick's thinking tends to support what is "reasonable," but I would like to think about the problem of euthanasia in light of his writings on human relationships.

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The purpose of this study is to show that a person of religion should provide spiritual care prior to religious care when caring for a dying person or family members. The facts that dying persons have questions on death, and that religion can provide answers on death, have encouraged the clergy to participate in hospice care. These two facts, however, do not necessarily grant them entry in Japan. It is necessary to discuss the difference between spiritual care and religious care from the clinical point of view. Five cases, including a failure, are shown and analyzed, through my clinical experience as a Buddhist chaplain at the Vihara Ward (Buddhist Hospice), Nagaoka-Nishi Hospital in Niigata Prefecture. These cases and other studies point out that it is important for a care provider to follow the client's beliefs and not force them to follow one's own doctrine. Thus a person of religion as a care provider should give first priority to spiritual care, and then specific religious care if needed.

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We carried out interview surveys with visiting nurses in the Noto region of Ishikawa Prefecture regarding views on life and death as expressed by elderly end-of-life patients living at home. We encoded the language that included expressed views on life and death as data, qualitatively analyzed this data, and then categorized it. Two points were suggested as findings when the analysis results were considered from a theological point of view: (1) The significance of adopting education regarding views on life and death in the training of visiting nurses, etc.; and (2) The passing on of local religious culture is taking on the function of preparatory education regarding death. End-of-life medical treatment in the home differs from that in hospitals and facilities, in that it is a process towards death (life process) through the extension of one's everyday life, and in that the lifestyle habits and environments of the elderly patients are generally continued as they have been to that point. In particular, in a region such as Noto, home-treated patients follow the process towards a natural death while being intimately conscious of traditional religious traditions and ceremonies. Along with the dedicated efforts of individuals in the home-treatment field, traditional religious and folkway views on life and death are currently one device that functions as a way for the elderly to stage their end-of-life phase in the way that they desire.

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