‘Like entering a prison’: Japan’s leprosy sufferers sue government for decades of pain
Twenty years after Japan ended the compulsory segregation of people living with leprosy, the families of former patients launched a class action seeking compensation for decades of discrimination simply for being related to people with leprosy
Three years after the end of the second world war, Shinji Nakao stepped off a boat on to Nagashima island, convinced that his life was about to take a turn for the better.
The 14-year-old had been diagnosed with leprosy, then a widely misunderstood disease that struck fear into its victims and condemned them to decades of appalling treatment at the hands of the Japanese state.
“I thought I was going to get help and be able to lead a normal life,” Nakao, now 81, told The Guardian. “It felt like I was going on a little adventure.”
It was like entering a prison ... I realised as soon as I set foot on Nagashima my freedom had vanished
But his optimism vanished as soon as he arrived at Aiseien, a sanatorium for hundreds of leprosy patients looking out over the Seto inland sea that separates the island from mainland Japan.
Nakao – thereafter referred to as patient No. 4973 – and other new arrivals were taken into quarantine, stripped of their clothes and valuables and photographed, before being made to lower themselves into a bath of hot water and cresol disinfectant. They spent a week to 10 days being observed in hospital wards, segregated by sex, age and the severity of their symptoms.
“It was like entering a prison,” said Nakao, who shared a dormitory with 70 other children. “We were referred to by our numbers, and of course we couldn’t leave. I realised as soon as I set foot on Nagashima my freedom had vanished.”
But Nakao was not the only member of his family to suffer as a result of leprosy, now commonly referred to as Hansen’s disease after Gerhard Armauer Hansen, the Norwegian doctor who identified the bacterium that causes leprosy in 1873.