For quite some time, our popular culture has had a vision of creatures that are neither human nor machine, but some mix of the two. Yet the ethnographic facts about these fabulous beings are not what one might expect. They have a far more entrenched role in Japan than in the West. This fact is of curious interest in connection with brain death.

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We think that a person who is maintained simply by machine and who has no consciousness is finished. We say, oddly, that the person has become a vegetable. We mean that there is nothing there but a mechanism. Hence, there is no longer a person there in the hospital bed. We are content to say, "brain dead, so dead indeed." Note how Cartesian we are. The soul, we think, has flown; now there is only a body kept going by chemistry and mechanics."