Spiritual Ends: Religion and the Heart of Dying in Japan

Abstract

What role does religion play at the end of life in Japan? Spiritual Ends draws on ethnographic fieldwork and interviews to provide an intimate portrayal of how spiritual care is provided to the dying in Japan. Timothy O. Benedict shows how hospice caregivers in Japan are appropriating and reinterpreting global ideas about spirituality and the practice of spiritual care. Benedict relates these findings to a longer story of how Japanese religious groups have pursued vocational roles in medical institutions as a means to demonstrate a so-called “healthy” role in society. Focusing on how care for the kokoro (heart or mind) is key to the practice of spiritual care, this book enriches conventional understandings of religious identity in Japan while offering a valuable East Asian perspective to global conversations on the ways religion, spirituality, and medicine intersect at death.

New life in Japan's ‘endingness’ business

“…It is this 'heart' that Timothy O. Benedict (2023) has recently described as key to the spiritual care cultivated in hospice facilities across Japan. This, too, is what the two of us found to be a persistent refrain in our respective research projects: the desire to retain the human touch that accords dignity and respect to the dead, even as ending arrangements slip away from the kin-based, temple-led model.…”