"In Japan today, talking about death is taboo," Kobe University medical professor Yoshiyuki Kizawa told the Asahi Shimbun earlier this month.

It is remarkable that this should be so. Japan of all nations should be primed for such a discussion. Its traditional culture is breathtakingly forthright on the subject, and its present and future, with the world's oldest and fastest-aging population, threaten to be engulfed by it. Few issues press harder than that of how we must, should or want to face death. A taboo seems an unaffordable luxury.

Perhaps it's in part a backlash against the death obsession of premodern Bushido, the "way of the warrior." Samurai in particular, and in emulation of them merchants and lovers scarcely less so, made their whole lives a preparation for death — inflicted or self-inflicted; in battle, in business or in love; as a token of loyalty, sincerity, or hopelessness; it hardly mattered. An 18th-century text known as the "Primer of Bushido" says, "The idea most vital and essential to the samurai is that of death, which he ought to have before his mind day and night, night and day, from the dawn of the first day of the year till the last minute of the last day of it."