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Japanese Health Care
| Article
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12616 |
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Section : |
CULTURE
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| Issue
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6 / 1987 |
5,917 Words |
| Author
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Patricia Braun
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Japan, the most industrialized nation in Asia, is a country with ancient values, where temples, shrines, and museums miraculously coexist with a modern world. Separated from all other countries by the sea, Japan's early culture was a combination of domestic development and foreign influences through contact with China and the Korean peninsula. However, Japan never simply adopted or imitated imported cultural influences wholesale. Even now, in the continued process of assimilation and adaptation to the West, the Japanese people exercise autonomy and originality.
In Japan it is not unusual to see youngsters dressed in jeans, as well as kimono-clad traditionalists, lining up at a fast-food outlet located near a historical shrine. Confirmation of continued peaceful integration of Oriental and Western patterns in this rapidly changing society can thus be found in such day-to-day aspects as nutrition and general health care.
Foreign influences were of crucial importance to the historical development of Japanese medical sciences. Besides two major periods of Chinese cultural impact, circa A.D. 600-894 and 1401-1854, two smaller waves of influence came from the West.
Buddhism, with its sophisticated philosophical systems transmitting consciousness of body, speech, and mind, was introduced to Japan over fifteen hundred years ago and proliferated into many schools and sects. Chinese medicine arrived alongside Buddhism during the same period, absorbing existing native empiric medicine and practices and gaining increasing popularity. It was dominated by Buddhist priests, who were always priests first and medical practitioners second.
In the Nara Period (A.D. 710-783) Buddhism reached its peak of popularity, and medicine became extremely complex, incorporating with Chinese medicine such remote elements as knowledge from India and drugs from the Middle East, while native medicine continued in the background. Official cultural exchanges with China were cut off in A.D. 894, however, the imported knowledge of the leading Sui and T'ang schools of medicine continued to be digested true to the Japanese way. With the shifting of power to the Ashikaga shoguns, medicine spread among the ordinary people, and a new system of medical thought was introduced by physicians who studied in Ming China (1368-1644), where the study of medicine was based on the Li and Chu schools.
In the first part of the second Chinese wave, not only priests but also a new class of secular medical men appeared. Members of both groups went to China for the sole purpose of studying medicine, accelerating the influx of contemporary Chinese medicine into Japan.
In the Edo period (1603-1868), Confucianism became the basis of all medical learning, and the idea that the basic spirit behind medical science and Confucianism was identical gained ground. Confucius (551-479 B.C.) advocated self-cultivation and inner enlightenment. Confucianism is both a system of philosophy and religion, embracing traditional elements of Chinese religion, such as a reverence toward Heaven and the worship of ancestors. Under the enthusiastic patronage of emperors and high ministers, Japan imported Confucianism into its national life and culture (even in contemporary Japan traces of Confucian character are still noticeable among the people, and active Confucian temples are
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