This is a book on the contemporary health care system in urban Japan. It is not, however, the usual social science study containing only “facts” and statistics. Nor does it present cures for specific illnesses or descriptions of the effectiveness of certain herbs. Instead, it focuses on a culturally defined concept of hygiene, urban magic, deities and buddhas as medical doctors, and family involvement in the care of the sick, as well as clinics and hospitals. The book consists of descriptive data and my interpretations of the sociocultural patterns underlying the concepts of illness and health and the health-related activities of contemporary Japanese. The book illustrates that, despite industrialization and significant advances in modern science, including biomedicine, in contemporary Japan, Japanese concepts and behavior regarding health and illness are to a large extent culturally patterned, even when they are couched in biomedical idioms.

A latent but more ambitious aim of the book is to lay the groundwork for a future undertaking: the critical appraisal of some of the assumptions made in the social sciences about the effects of modernization on a culture and society. Data about the health-related behavior of contemporary urban Japanese, as presented in this book, challenge the view held by some social scientists that modernization produces a “rational” individual whose behavior loses symbolic dimensions. For this larger aim, then, the choice of the modern Japanese health care system as a subject for study is a strategic one. The contemporary Japanese are a non-Western population among whom both industrialization and the development of science have reached a high degree.