ABSTRACT

This chapter provides a comparison between the Western and the Japanese attitude to death and dying, and discovered similarities and differences. Coming back to the ‘rose’ analogy, religious values and symbolism, which have remained in the modern secularized Western mind and without an awareness of God’s existence, in order to complete the pilgrim-cancer patient metaphor. The idea of a ‘sad death’ in the Japanese mind does not lend itself to the Western hospice notion of ‘pilgrimage’. The Japanese tradition and culture of death and dying seem to ‘wear Western clothes’ but under the Western clothes they have always been Japanese. The change in the way Japanese people understand death seemed to occur suddenly but on the surface, while the Western change has occurred gradually taking place over hundreds of years and following the redefinition of the value of life and death in the Western mind.