A Music Thanatologist in Tokyo

Carol Sack, who along with her husband Jim work at the Japan Lutheran Theological Seminary in Mitaka, Tokyo, was interviewed for a 30 minute weekly broadcast on religion on NHK Radio 2 today. Carol, a music thanatologist*, offers palliative care through harp and voice at the bedside of the dying, going weekly to a hospice for the homeless in Tokyo. She now trains others in the discipline through courses in harp, voice, and theological reflection.

I recorded the re-broadcast of the interview and posted it to the following as an audiobook file that you can add to your iTunes library. The interview is in Japanese:

https://files.me.com/ruthie/b2y9kx.mp3

The name of the file is "Carol_Sack_NHK_Radio_Interview.mp3" and it is about 29 megabytes in size.

Here is the NHK broadcast schedule listing of the re-broadcast:

http://cgi4.nhk.or.jp/hensei/program/p.cgi?area=001&date=2011-03-27&ch=06&eid=84967

* Thanatology is the academic, and often scientific, study of death among human beings. It investigates the circumstances surrounding a person's death, the grief experienced by the deceased's loved ones, and larger social attitudes towards death such as ritual and memorialization. It is primarily an interdisciplinary study, frequently undertaken by professionals in nursing, psychology, sociology, psychiatry, social work, and is offered as a course of study at many art schools. It also describes bodily changes that accompany death and the after-death period.

Courtesy of Joel Ingulsrud (formerly of Nagoya and now Tokyo)