Victims of Japan’s Forced Sterilizations Demand Justice After Decades of Silence
TOKYO--One day when Saburo Kita was 14, he was taken from an institution for troubled children to see a doctor. Despite protesting that his health was fine, he was ordered to strip, lie down on a table, and was given a local anesthetic.
He was left with a thick, v-shaped scar on his lower body and questions about what had happened. Months later, talking with a friend, he learned that he had been sterilized. So had two others from the same institution in Miyagi, northern Japan.
“There was no explanation, ever,” said Kita, now 75, who uses the pseudonym in media to avoid questions from his late wife’s family. “I was left with a body that couldn’t create children.”
But he did not realize until January that his surgery was part of a government program to prevent the birth of so-called “inferior descendants” that saw tens of thousands sterilized, often without their consent, under a law not revoked until 1996.
Most were physically or cognitively disabled. But others suffered from leprosy--curable, and now known as Hansen’s disease--mental illness or simply had behavioral problems. Kita had been sent to an institution for fighting at school.
Now the victims, many of whom were in their teens or younger when they were sterilized, are fighting back, demanding justice from a government they say violated their human rights. A mentally disabled woman in her 60s has sued for an apology and 11 million yen ($100,328) in compensation, and other suits may follow soon.
All could embarrass the government, which insists the surgeries were done legally, and Japan, where attitudes about the disabled still lag other advanced nations even as it prepares to host the Paralympic Games in 2020.
“Right after the war, rebuilding the country and its people was paramount, so in the name of building better citizens for the nation, the law came into effect,” said Keiko Toshimitsu, a bioethics researcher and head of an activist group supporting those who were forcibly sterilized. “It was to build a better Japan--along, of course, with prejudice against the disabled.
“Then in the 1960s and 1970s there was rapid economic growth so they needed people born who could keep the growth going.”
Though the most notorious eugenics laws were imposed by Nazi Germany, Japan is not the only nation with similar programs in peacetime. Sweden sterilized 63,000 people under a 1935-1975 program, almost all women, in the name of racial purity.
Thirty-two U.S. states embraced eugenics at some point, with the number of sterilizations climbing after a 1927 Supreme Court decision upholding a Virginia law. In the majority opinion, Chief Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes compared the state’s duty to sterilize a woman to the need to protect the public against smallpox with compulsory vaccinations.
But laws overseas, by and large, were revoked in the 1970s; Sweden apologized and paid compensation after media reports brought the problem to light in 1997. The U.S. states of North Carolina and Virginia have also offered compensation.
Japan’s “Eugenics Protection Law” came into effect in 1948 as it struggled with food shortages and rebuilding a ravaged nation.
Sterilizations peaked in the 1960s and 1970s. The last surgery under the law was carried out in 1993, and the measure was revoked three years later.
Of the estimated 25,000 people sterilized during this time, at least 16,500 did not give consent--unneeded if a eugenics board signed off on it after an often cursory review. Few records remain.
Though overt discrimination has fallen, attitudes toward the disabled lag those overseas, sometimes in harmful ways. In 2016, 19 people at a facility for the disabled were killed in their sleep by a man who had advocated euthanasia for the physically and mentally impaired.
With the Paralympics rapidly approaching, the government has doubled down on public education, advocating kindness and urging people to offer help to disabled people they may see.
For Kita, who often looks at fellow train passengers and thinks his children might have been that age, anger remains strong.
“I just can’t stand the way the nation’s handled things. They sterilized me, then now they say ‘oh, we don’t know anything,’” he said, speaking to Reuters in his narrow, dark, Tokyo apartment.
“An apology is not enough. What I want to say is: give me back my life.”
