Most of my day was spent helping my sister pack to move out of her apartment, so again I hope that my thoughts are somewhat coherent. Anyway, onto to the good stuff! Or, I guess, not-so good stuff, as this post is about illness and medicine.<\/p>\n
The readings I will focus on are the following:<\/p>\n
There are multiple distinctions in Japanese about different states of health\u00a0or “constitutions” of one’s body.\u00a0<\/strong>Something that I first noticed about this reading was the use of the phrase “cultural germs.” What a fascinating concept!\u00a0And it makes a lot of sense. What makes something a germ is not definitive, and even the word itself implies that germs are inherently bad, which may not be the case in some cultures. For example, this author\u00a0recounted an incident in which a Japanese male with high social standing was not afraid to reveal he was sick. Sickness, the author argued, was something more to be proud of than to hide in Japan.\u00a0I wonder how this ties back to the concept of purity we talked about in the beginning of this week. Is there a Japanese state of being pure? What’s the distinction between physical and mental purity? How does sickness fit in? Is illness\u00a0more of a way to getting to “purity” (since it is viewed as having sensitivity to your surroundings)? The author does point out the difference between an acute illness and a more chronic, life-threatening illness. The former is called jiby\u014d, and an example is like dizziness or cramps. But there are also “constitutions” that the author defines (though the author does not define what a “constitution” is, which is why I use quotations. My guess would be the state of the body, but I am not too sure). These range from\u00a0from healthy to ordinary to weak, and some symptoms of being weak include being a light sleeper or sensitive to the cold. What is the significance of these distinctions?<\/p>\n Kanp\u014d reminds me of palliative care.\u00a0<\/strong>I’m not an expert in either subject, but<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Most of my day was spent helping my sister pack to move out of her apartment, so again I hope that my thoughts are somewhat coherent. Anyway, onto to the good stuff! Or, I guess, not-so good stuff, as this post is about illness and medicine. The readings I will focus on are the following: … Continue reading “Illness From a Japanese Perspective”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":483,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[26],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-166","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-26"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/courses.bowdoin.edu\/japan-and-the-environment-2017\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/166","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/courses.bowdoin.edu\/japan-and-the-environment-2017\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/courses.bowdoin.edu\/japan-and-the-environment-2017\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/courses.bowdoin.edu\/japan-and-the-environment-2017\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/483"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/courses.bowdoin.edu\/japan-and-the-environment-2017\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=166"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/courses.bowdoin.edu\/japan-and-the-environment-2017\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/166\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/courses.bowdoin.edu\/japan-and-the-environment-2017\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=166"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/courses.bowdoin.edu\/japan-and-the-environment-2017\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=166"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/courses.bowdoin.edu\/japan-and-the-environment-2017\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=166"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}