ABSTRACT
This chapter examines how things that were part of the process of introducing Spare Parts to a Japanese readership can have significance for North Americans. It explores reasons why this has relevance for more generalized thinking about medicine and how it features in the interactions between cultures. The greater degree to which the Japanese were shocked by the cases calls attention to one need for a comparative bioethics that attends closely to what at first may seem to be small but ultimately unimportant nuances among cultures in such matters. Moreover, the need for physical courage is largely gone and too overt a "pioneering" spirit would be socially and psychologically out of place. And much of the advanced "know-how" that earlier had been a privileged possession of the Catholic and Protestant missions in Japan has by now passed into the general society as commonly held intellectual and technical property.
