ABSTRACT
Japan may have to change its whole culture if it is to look at the issue of ‘truth telling’ as an individual’s right, because this changes the meaning of disease and death from an event of the group into that of one individual. In taking the hospice philosophy from the West, Japan has transfigured it so as to suit its own culture, but in this ‘transfiguration’ of the hospice concept the Japanese hospice may no longer be appropriately called a ‘hospice’ any more. Japan does not have to abandon its culture in relation to its attitude to death and dying, because it has helped its people to accept and share the matter of death without their being a strong fear of death. In Japanese hospice care, half of terminally ill cancer patients still do not know their diagnosis, and this is partly because Japanese hospices are being developed inside hospitals.
