printOur bodies are our prime real estate: all rights, property rights especially, ensue from the title one has in one’s body.–ilana
The website of Japan’s Ministry of Health, Labor and Welfare displays the government’s COVID-19 vaccination policy.
Consent to vaccination
Although we encourage all citizens to receive the COVID-19 vaccination, it is not compulsory or mandatory. Vaccination will be given only with the consent of the person to be vaccinated after the information provided. Please get vaccinated of your own decision, understanding both the effectiveness in preventing infectious diseases and the risk of side effects. No vaccination will be given without consent. Please do not force anyone in your workplace or those who around you to be vaccinated, and do not discriminate against those who have not been vaccinated.
In the land of the free, Japan, the government rejects compulsory vaccination, demands CONSENT on vaccination, and forbids forcing vaccination or discriminating against those who make a legitimate choice against being vaccinated. In the West it is the opposite.
These Japanese policy makers clearly understand that they are dealing with the ultimate human right, the dominion over one’s body. Alongside a policy statement evincing respect for the people’s bodily autonomy is a link to “Human Rights Counseling in foreign languages.” In other words, correct actions regarding Covid policy follow from the use of the correct language, the language of individual right.
And that language is the language of self-ownership. Our bodies are our prime real estate: all rights, property rights especially, ensue from the title one has in one’s body.
Conversely, the pied pipers at the helm of the American Covid cartel are as malevolent and they are mediocre.
Then again, the people get the leaders they deserve. That Americans are led by self-serving degenerates—morally and intellectually, left and right—is because majorities, sometimes slim, sometimes overwhelming, have ensconced them there.
I readily forgo any claim to expertise on Japanese culture, much of which remains impenetrable to me (which is refreshing in our homogenized global “community”). Bearing that qualification in mind, perhaps it is misleading to present this laudable development through an abstract, legalistic framework of “individual rights” which, though important for human flourishing, are not substantive in themselves. Rights are embodied only in given cultural contexts which make the underlying philosophical claims intelligible; in this instance, the Japanese commitment to bodily autonomy is nourished from still deeper streams of thought pertaining to the human person. There is a sense in which the traditional folkways, particularly Shintoism, are so naturalistic as to preclude the individual as a denatured, rootless agent automatically presumed in human rights ideology—indeed, as anything other than what he is: a unique life.
Here the question of vaccinations [read: injections] corresponds to that of abortions. I was reminded how Dr. Ikeda, a Japanese pro-life activist, articulated the difference to New Oxford Review:
‘The problem seems to be one of outlook, of civilizational disposition. “The West has so many fighters for life,” Ikeda continues, “but at the same time Western culture is legalistic and sometimes Western thinking is too abstract. Pro-lifers in the United States fight to overturn Roe vs. Wade, for example. This is a good thing, but I want to think bigger. I want to make abortion, not illegal, but unthinkable. And I’m not sure the West is the forum for doing that. In the West, one is pro-life. I want to be in awe of life, to change hearts and not just laws.” […] “Japan’s big strength,” Ikeda says, “is anti-abstractionism. We know what a human being is and we don’t say one thing is something else. A child is always a child here. That is a good place—the only place—to start.”’
https://www.newoxfordreview.org/making-abortion-unthinkable-in-japan/
A sad but perhaps necessary casualty of this interminable pandemic has been to expose universal “rights” for the discursive fiction that it inevitably becomes when the native soil which first gave it life finally dries up.
Very interesting comment, Nicholas. You are correctly pointing out, lest we forget, that the language of individual rights must never become propositional. That in essence is the argument undergirding my Cannibal book: against propostionalism. Perhaps it is correct to say, then, that the Japanese authorities have sufficient respect and fondness for their people as to not wish to coerce them into actions that may not be good or right for them? I think that narrow statement is just as formidable—maybe even more—than the oft-denuded language of individual rights.
Thanks for your contribution. I really appreciate your sharp comments.