DEATH IN TECHNOLOGICAL TIME - LOCATING THE END OF MEANINGFUL LIFE

This article demonstrates how debate about technologically manipulated death is elaborated in radically different forms in the scientificall y sophisticated spaces of Japan and North America. Using recent histor ical materials and contemporary medical, philosophical, and media publ ications, I argue that the institutionalization and legitimization of ''brain death'' as the end of life in North America have been Purified by a dominant discourse in which it is asserted that if certain measu rable criteria are fulfilled, an individual can be declared scientific ally dead. In Japan, by contrast, death is interpreted primarily as a social and not an individual event, and efforts to scientifically defi ne the end of life as a measurable point in time are rejected outright by the majority, including many clinicians. The margins between natur e and culture are debated in both cultural spaces, bur assigned differ ent moral status in the respective dominant discourses.