lepers in japan--3/2/2026

02 Mar 2026

lepers in japan--3/2/2026

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Today's selection-- from Outcast by Oliver Basciano. The protest against Leper's Island:

“On 31 July 1998, Yasushi Shimura walked into Kumamoto District Court and sued the Japanese government. Flanked by his lawyers, he was wearing dark glasses, a dark shirt and braces holding up well-pressed trousers, his stride determined as he mounted the steps. A small rally of supporters stood outside, and in the coming months this posse would swell. Shimura was joined by twelve other leprosy patients in his lawsuit, three from the National Sanatorium Kikuchi Keifu-en where he still lives, as well as residents of the neighbouring Hoshizuka Keiai-en hospital. Those numbers would also increase as the case progressed, with similar petitions being made to courts around the country.

“Their accusation? An 'unprecedented abrogation of human rights' and the 'violation of the Constitution of Japan' carried out systematically, for decades, affecting thousands. Forced labour, unfair incarceration, arbitrary punishment, coerced sterilisations and abortions: the prolonged and purposeful use of stigmatisation as a public health weapon by politicians. Because of strict laws that once mandated sterilisation and abortion for leprosy patients in Japan, Shimura and his fellow claimants are the last few of a generation touched by the state’s attempts to control the disease in the twentieth century. Shimura’s demands? To be remembered. Once the paperwork had been handed over to the presiding judge, the litigants issued a statement to the waiting media: ‘When these have been achieved, we intend to hold memorial services for our forebears who rest in the mausolea in the leprosaria across Japan to bring healing to their sufferings.’

“Everything about Shimura's outward appearance that day suggested steely resolve. Anger. Inside, however, he says he was a tumble of nerves and emotions, with little desire for all the publicity. In his pocket he held a small memorial tablet to Misao, the foetus the doctors at Keifu-en had taken away from his wife. 'It is something I rarely discussed even among my friends,' he would later write. 'Even people with the same scars do not want to touch each other.'

National Sanatorium, Kikuchi Keifuen

“Keifu-en is a forty-five-minute ride on a two-carriage train from Kumamoto city, on Japan's southern island of Kyushu. It's a journey I would hear about repeatedly. When first diagnosed aged fifteen, Shimura knew something of his fate because his father worked for Japan Railways and told him of the specially sealed carriages that he would sometimes have to couple up. Getting off at the last stop, I wander through a modern medical centre that serves the city's growing suburbs, crossing the road to the drive that leads into the older sanatorium. Keifu-en still feels like a hospital, more than any other leprosaria I've been to. It does share some universal traits with the others: the tranquillity, the nature, the strange uncertainty for a visitor as to whether this is public or private space. Here, however, Japan's Ministry of Health continues to keep the site orderly and clean. Staff wander around in uniforms or ride bikes neatly tagged with the name of the department each vehicle belongs to. The grass is perfectly clipped and signs, which I see a worker soap-sud clean, point to the outpatient dermatology unit or the residents' community hall. On arrival I am proudly shown the room in which I will stay a few nights, located in the new five-unit visitor accommodation block the patients campaigned for. 'We're getting old,' one tells me, 'and so are our visitors.' As I take a pair of slippers from the rack at the front door and swap them for my outdoor shoes, I reply that it's nicer than many hotels I've stayed in.

“This sanatorium opened in 1909 to hold the 'national disgrace' of those among the 30,359 people with leprosy at the beginning of the century who had turned to vagrancy or begging. Former police officers were put in charge and invariably brought in their old colleagues to secure what was in effect a poor house. This limited purview changed in the late 1920s when Kensuke Mitsuda, a 'god-like' leprologist with the ear of the Japanese government and the support of the powerful Westernising industrialist Shibusawa Eiichi, began advocating strict segregation for the entire patient population. Mitsuda, like his allies in the colonial offices of the European powers, looked back to a mythic past to justify the 'modernising' action: 'Before the Restoration, as a principle of social order those of leprosy lineages were excluded by the public, and so they naturally came together to form villages and in this way the spread of the disease was forestalled, but after the Restoration ... all the old ways were destroyed.' The apparent 'old ways' were soon enshrined in law and from then the government zealously pursued what was dubbed the muraiken undo policy. Roughly translating as the 'No Leprosy Patients in Our Prefecture Movement', it was a massive government-funded health campaign that 'cleansed' communities of any patients living among them. With the instigation of an annual Leprosy Prevention Day, one observer in Tokyo reported:

“Every street was dotted with tens of thousands of posters advertising leprosy prevention, and on every street corner someone was making an impassioned speech to the passing crowds ... This shrill noise was accompanied by the sound of a plane overhead making circles while dropping blue leaflets. Standing face-to-face in a crowd, we heard someone say excitedly, 'Ladies and gentlemen! Leprosy is not a disease for which you need feel shame. It is not hereditary. It is within our power to eradicate the leprosy we fear so much. The only way to do this is by strict isolation.'

“The 1940 film Spring on Leper's Island encapsulated the idea that to submit to the sanatoria was an act of community-mindedness and patriotism. It was distinct from much of the country's cinematic output of the period: less militaristic and nationalistic in tone, the film centred on a female doctor and took inspiration from the memoirs of a sanatorium worker published two years earlier. For all its humanist philosophy and director Shiro Toyoda's lingering shots soaking up the melancholic beauty of Japan's south-east islands, it had no less a propagandistic purpose. Cinemagoers were invited to admire the vocation of Mrs Koyama, the medic, as she gently persuaded patients, otherwise hidden away and dying in shame, to enter a sanatorium where they were well cared-for. The picture was deemed the best of the year by the country's biggest film magazine and unsurprisingly received a recommendation from the Department of Education.

“While among the newly institutionalised there were some who entered 'believing wholeheartedly that this was a national project', as one wrote bitterly decades later, for the most part the efforts of muraiken undo to segregate patients were bombastic, verging on violent. There's a striking scene in the film in which a group of kids, who are shown searching for fossils in the village stream, observe the health authorities arrive, no less assiduously 'hunting for lepers' among the streets and paths of the island. While the doctors on the silver screen are in suits, their real-life counterparts would arrive at the home of patients masked and dressed in white overalls, pushing trolley-mounted hoses — reminiscent of those used in South Africa, Romania and elsewhere — from which they dispersed disinfectant with such volume and force that property was often left bleached white. While Spring on Leper's Island was still playing in local theatres, in contrast to the kindly words of Mrs Koyama, the then-director of Keifu-en wrote to the Ministry of Health to boast of his 'mass sweep' of an area around a shrine that had historically attracted the sick begging for alms:

“On July 9th at 5 a.m. a total of 230 people including officials from the two prefectures, under the general command of the Kumamoto prefecture police chief, the Kumamoto north and south police stations, and the Kyushu sanatorium staff, were dispatched. The Honmyoji village was raided all at once and a suspect was arrested for leaking drinking water, taken first to Kyushu sanatorium in a truck and then to the local police detention centre on the premises.

“The detention process continued over the next day until all the remaining suspected patients were 'mopped up' — a total of 157 people were taken to the sanatorium that week. Photographs show military-style open-back trucks surrounded by doctors in protective gear and uniformed police in blue tunics. The vehicles are high enough that each patient has to step on a wooden crate as they are manhandled into the back, crammed together like cattle awaiting the abattoir. The resulting explosion in stigma that such spectacle ensured was not limited to the patients themselves. In the kind of testimony that became prosecution evidence decades later, one victim recalled that their name and address was printed in the newspapers the day after she was captured. 'My younger sister and others were working at a company, but when they found out they were fired.' One can gauge the level of hysteria by the fact it inspired a whole new genre of popular mystery fiction, stories serialised in weekly journals which contained all the red herrings, twists and turns familiar of the detective novel, but in which the reader is left guessing not who murdered who, but who infected who with leprosy. Hiding a family history of the disease became the motive for murder in one of the best-loved books by Seicho Matsumoto, the celebrated writer of hard-boiled crime fiction.

“Within twenty years the new law necessitated the opening of thirteen national sanatoria which at one time imprisoned around 11,000 patients, representing 91 per cent of all those diagnosed. Now, however, the sanatoria, all still standing, are home to under a thousand residents, most in their eighties or above.”