Banal nationalisms in medicine and prostate onco-practice in Japan: A urological viewpoint

Abstract

Cancer has the highest mortality and morbidity rates, and kills more men than women in Japan. Culturally and medically constructed as a ‘lifestyle-related disease’, prostate cancer incidence is directly proportional to the ‘Westernisation of eating habits’, and societal ageing. Nevertheless, campaigns to advocate routine testing for prostate cancer remain non-existent. Based on an adaptation of the ‘sexual scripts’ theorising (Gagnon and Simon, 2005), 21 Japanese urologists from Osaka, Kobe and Tokyo, recruited through snowball sampling, were interviewed from 2021 to 2022, to explore how banal nationalisms in medicine—daily medical practice grounded in cultural scripts concerning the Japanese ethnic-self, rather than in medical ‘biological causation to explain illness’ (Barry and Yuill, 2008, 20), influence their onco-practice. ‘Systemic networks’ (Bliss et al., 1983) underpinned the analysis of interviews, which indicates that the physicians tend to (re)produce banal nationalisms in medicine through an understanding of an onco-self, who embodies an ‘essentialised’ version of the Japanese-self concerning rational-thinking, medical-compliancy, and a dependency on familialism and the feminisation of care to cope with cancer. In grappling with prostate cancer, onco-biopedagogy built on the consumption of traditional Japanese food comprehends banal nationalisms in medicine entrenched in prostate onco-practice. Lastly, endorsing and subsidising Traditional Japanese Medicine encompass an element of onco-economics that involves banal nationalisms in medicine. Nonetheless, emotionality underneath decision-making processes, and an onco-self demanding a robotic surgery challenge the validity of banal nationalisms in medicine when grasping onco-practice.