Kindai Nihon no Hansen-byM mondai to chiiki shakai 近代日本のハンセン病問題と地域社会 [Modern Japan’s Hansen Disease Problem and Local Communities] (review)

In 1996, the Japanese government finally repealed its 1931 Leprosy Prevention Law. This law had required the segregation of some sufferers of the disease and resulted in the establishment of a system of national sanitaria that eventually housed more than ten thousand people. In the aftermath of the repeal, decades after effective treatments were available, a group of leprosarium residents sued the Japanese government for violating their civil rights. The lengthy trial that followed brought to light systematic abuses within the leprosaria, including sterilizations, forced abortions, coerced labor, and the harsh punishment of those who violated sanitarium rules. In 2001 the Kumamoto District Court, which heard the case, ruled in favor of the plaintiffs and ordered the Japanese government to pay reparations. When Prime Minister Koizumi JunichirM announced that the government would not appeal this ruling, the leprosy case was celebrated as a landmark decision that had finally compelled the Japanese government to acknowledge its abuse of fundamental human rights, something that early suits by former “comfort women” and prisoners of war had failed to accomplish.

This series of events prompted an explosion of interest in the history of leprosy in Japan among journalists, scholars, and activists. A quick check of Amazon Japan using the keyword Hansenbyō (i.e., “Hansen’s disease,” the term that has replaced raibyō or “leprosy,” which is now regarded as discriminatory in nature) resulted in a list of more than 400 books published in the last two decades. A similar search of Magazine Plus, an online search engine of a wide selection of both mass market magazines and scholarly journals, reveals that more 1400 articles on Hansen’s disease have been published since the mid-1990s. To a remarkable degree, this substantial body of literature has been informed by the work of Fujino Yutaka, an influential and prolific scholar who criticized Japan’s leprosy policy in his 1993 publication Nihon Fashizumu to iryo: Hansenbyō wo meguru jisshōteki kenkyū (Fascism and Medicine: Empirical Research on Hansen’s Disease), a work that played a role in prompting the repeal of the Leprosy Prevention Law. Since then, Fujino has published other works on Japan’s leprosy policy, including “Inochi” no kindaishi: “Minzoku jōka” no na no moto ni hakugaisareta Hansenbyō kanja (A Modern History of “Life”: The Persecution of Hansen’s Disease Patients under the Guise of “Ethnic Purity,” 2001); Hansenbyō to sengo minshūshugi: Naze kakuri ha kyokasaretaka (Hansen’s Disease and Postwar Democracy: Why Was Segregation Strengthened? 2006); Hansenbyō to hansei naki kokka: “‘Inochi’ no kindaishi” igo (Hansen’s Disease and the Unrepentant Nation-State: The Aftermath of “A Modern History of ‘Life,’” 2008); and SensM to Hansenbyō (War and Hansen’s Disease, 2009).

As these titles suggest, Fujino used the history of leprosy prevention in Japan to construct a powerful critique of the Japanese state, which he described as “fascist” in nature and whose policies he likened to those of Nazi Germany. He argued that beginning in the late nineteenth century the Japanese government, oriented by eugenicist concerns for strengthening the race and a nationalist desire to counter claims that leprosy was a disease of “backward” countries, began a concerted effort to control the disease. By publicizing exaggerated claims about the infectiousness of the disease, the state stigmatized the disease and its sufferers, a process that culminated in the passage of the 1931 law, which in Fujino’s rendering had the aim of segregating all sufferers of the disease in poorly funded public institutions, characterized by poor care, hard work, and draconian regulations that robbed residents of their basic human dignity.

Hirokawa Waka’s Kindai Nihon no Hansenbyō mondai to chiiki shakai (Modern Japan’s Hansen Disease Problem and Local Communities) is a richly documented and carefully argued work of revisionist history that raises important questions about the claims that have organized the work of Fujino and those who...