CLOSE-UP: Alfons Deeken
By Eriko Arita - Staff writer
On Friday, July 22, as the stifling heat and humidity of summer relented for just a fleeting few days, hundreds of people filled a hall at Enkakuji Temple in Kamakura, Kanagawa Prefecture, to listen to a lecture by philosophy scholar Alfons Deeken.
"I have been a member of various health ministry committees," the 79-year-old professor said rather solemnly. "And according to the ministry's statistics, the mortality rate of Japanese people is 100 percent." It was his way of stressing that everyone has to face death.
Deeken, who is honorary chairman of Sei to Shi wo Kangaeru Kai (the Japanese Association of Death Education and Grief Counseling), which he founded 1983, then went on to emphasize that learning about death and dying is not a depressing pursuit, but one that leads to a fuller appreciation of life.
Deeken in the Alps, during his time as a student in Munich
During his childhood in wartime Germany, Deeken often encountered death in his family and among his friends, including those who were victims of Allied bombing. However, such experiences — as he explains in one of his books, titled "Yoku Iki Yoku Warai Yoki Shi to Deau" ("Good Living, Good Humor, Good Death") — led him to choose thanatology (the study of death) as his life's work.
Photo courtesy: University of Human Arts & Sciences
After war's end in 1945, the then teenage Deeken threw himself into the world of books, and it was after he read a biography of St. Francis Xavier that he decided to become a Catholic priest. So, after graduating from high school, he entered the Society of Jesus (the Roman Catholic, all-male, evangelizing Jesuits) in Germany before studying German literature in Austria and then gaining a master's degree in philosophy from a university in Munich.
In 1959, Deeken came to Japan to study Japanese and theology, and he was ordained as a priest in 1965. Then, from 1967 to 1973, he studied for his Ph.D. in philosophy at Fordham University in New York City, an institution "in the Jesuit tradition."
Dr. Alfons Deeken gave a keynote speech on spiritual healing and humor at a study session on "Thinking about Life and Death: How We Should Approach Life, How We Should Support Each Other," on July 2, 2011
Deeken has received many awards for his promotion of death education, including the highly prestigious Kikuchi Kan cultural award in 1991 and the Cross of the Order of Merit of the German Federal Republic in 1998.
Now, although he retired from the university in 2003, Deeken is still busy lecturing on life and death all around Japan. He did, however, find time to meet with The Japan Times at Sophia University on July 19.
Let me ask you about your background. What made you start thinking deeply about death?
I began thinking about death at an early age. When I was 8, I experienced the death of my young sister from leukemia. In grade school, I experienced many deaths during the Allied bombings in northern Germany in World War II. Some of my classmates were burned to death before my eyes in incendiary attacks. On the last day of WWII, my grandfather, who had risked his life in the anti-Nazi movement, was standing in front of our house, waving a white flag welcoming the Allied troops. He was shot in front of my eyes by the first arriving Allied soldier.
Through all those experiences, I began to think deeply about death, and make a distinction between an unavoidable death, as in the case of my younger sister, and avoidable deaths brought about by the warmongering of Germany's irresponsible Nazi government.
In retrospect, an important inspiration for choosing the philosophy of death and death education as my academic life's work came from my sister Paula, who died at home at age 4. She had been told by her doctor and by our parents that there was no cure for her leukemia and that she would have to face death soon. At that time there was no cure for leukemia. In our family there were eight brothers and sisters, so we took turns sitting at the bedside of our dying sister. She amazed all of us with the way she faced her approaching death.
As children of pious Catholic parents we had, of course, been told that for Christians death is not the end of everything but the gate to heaven. Our sister surprised us on her last day when she shook hands with everybody and simply said "I shall see you again in heaven." That enormous spiritual energy of hope was the testament of our dying sister to her parents and her seven brothers and sisters.
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(C) The Japan Times
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