When I Die: Biopolitics and the Ethics of Dying in Japans Super-aged Society

Abstract

This article investigates the notion of the elderly in Japan as agents who practice biopolitics themselves, and not simply the sacrificial targets of governmental biopolitical policy. It examines the sociocultural context which obligates senior citizens to engage within the national biopolitical arena despite their cognizance that neither medical technology nor welfare policies can ensure a desirable end to their lives. By looking at case studies within Nagano Prefecture, it considers how the ontological framing of old people has changed through historically sequential governmental biopolitical projects, and how the elderly have come to formulate their own sense of ethics surrounding death in response. This study uncovers how governmental biopolitical approaches, which seek to deny the deteriorative processes of human aging, risk fostering contempt for, and the exclusion of, all senior citizens of an advanced age, as they reach the conclusion of their lives.