Since April 1996, Japanese health care providers who practise informed consent have been financially rewarded. Although there is no precedent for this financial gain, there are no detailed studies. Focused on a group of Latin American men living with HIV/AIDS, this paper clarifies the actual practices of informed consent at Japanese medical facilities. Twenty HIV-positive men were interviewed in order to investigate how they obtained medical treatment and how they were informed about their physical condition. From April to September 2002 and during August 2003 and 2004, a set of six interviews were conducted with each male, who were 28-37 years old. Participants were acquired through a hospital and a non-governmental organization, and by snowball sampling. The interviews showed that most of the informants received information concerning medical treatment, but they were advised neither about alternative treatments nor about the feasibility of seeking a third party's advice. Informed consent and communication between the informants and physicians were obstructed by language and structural, as well as cultural barriers. In conclusion, this paper adds a new dimension to the understanding of informed consent as the authors regard the practice as an educational process for health care providers and patients.
This paper analyses the views of 20 Japanese mothers concerning paediatric male circumcision and penile hygiene. In Japan, routine male circumcision has never been implemented for newborns and children, and adult males are mostly circumcised at aesthetic clinics. However, media reports indicate a trend of Japanese mothers willing to have their sons circumcised. In discussing penile hygiene and male circumcision, the construct of a 'sexual script' becomes relevant to understanding how linguistic and gender barriers made references to male genitalia and penile hygiene largely appear as 'vulgar' and 'unfeminine' in daily life conversations. Peers were often identified as the main source of information and only mothers who have struggled with their children's penile infections have learnt about male genital hygiene, a domain of knowledge largely transmitted by men. Male circumcision becomes a double-edged sword that could help prevent penile infections but also an embarrassing conversational topic that could elicit discrimination because most Japanese children are uncircumcised.
In order to propose an educational intervention for sexuality education courses at a Japanese senior high school, we interviewed 51, 15-18-year-old, male Japanese senior high school students, and 4 teachers who impart sex education in the school. Moreover, we analysed the `master narrative' produced by the Japanese Ministry of Education (Monbusho) to regulate the sexual behaviour of young people through the contents of purity and sex education. A close examination of Monbusho's master narrative revealed that the ` Nemureru ko wo okosu mono dearu' (literally means an issue that wakes up sleeping children. A close expression in English is `let sleeping dogs lie') is still the tenet of sex education at school. We present the ways our sample regards teaching sex in relation to their sexual cultures and their needs for information about sexuality. Our interviews show the ways in which our informants create their own sexual cultures by incorporating, discarding or frankly rejecting notions of sex, contraception and risk that are included in sex education at school, in pornography and in talking with peers.
The introduction of Viagra in Japan is largely associated with the construction of ‘abject masculinities’. The approval of the drug comes amidst worries about hormones polluting the environment and Japanese men's unwillingness to perform their ‘appropriate gender role’ in a country coping with problems in the economy, a growing number of unmarried people, an ageing population and declining birth rates. In this article, I analyse how impotence, gender and reproduction are entangled in the ways in which Japanese physicians report erectile dysfunction (ED) and prescribe Viagra. The accounts of physicians, taken from the media and scientific reports, show that medical doctors tend to uphold ‘the Viagrization of ED’, which will lead to the Viagrization of Japan. Despite discourses on medicalized sexuality, reproductive behaviour and promotion of childbirth, the politics of Viagra largely promote male recreational sex with substantial benefits for the pharmaceutical and sex industries. Also, the politics of Viagra seem to underpin the commodification of a sexualized male body that ignores the reproductive health concerns of Japanese men.
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