Recording Japan’s disabled lives

Ten years ago, the worst single-perpetrator act of violence against disabled people anywhere in the world took place in Japan. Satoshi Uematsu murdered 19 people and injured another 26 at Tsukui Yamayuri-en (Tsukui Lily Garden): a residential facility for people with disabilities in the city of Sagamihara, around 30 miles west of Tokyo. A former employee at the facility who knew its layout well, he broke in through a window in the middle of the night, armed with sashimi knives. He later drove to a police station and turned himself in.

The killings were profoundly shocking, in a country widely considered one of the safest in the world. But no less disturbing was the light shone by subsequent debates in the media on attitudes towards disability in Japan. Uematsu had written to politicians a few months before his attack on the facility, telling the speaker of the lower house of the Japanese parliament that his ‘goal [was] a world in which the severely disabled can be euthanised, with their guardians’ consent, if they are unable to live at home and be active in society’.

Japanese journalists and academics were quick to trace a link between Uematsu’s actions and stated motivations, on the one hand, and the country’s history of eugenics on the other. Japan first passed a eugenics law in 1940, emulating Nazi measures a few years earlier. It allowed for the sterilisation of people with genetic disorders, but was used minimally because Japan’s wartime leaders did not want to run the risk of a shortage of soldiers and workers if hostilities dragged on.

Far greater use was made of a postwar Eugenic Protection Law (EPL), passed in 1948 during the Allied Occupation (1945-52). This provided for the voluntary and involuntary sterilisation of people suffering from certain hereditary and non-hereditary conditions, including intellectual disabilities and mental illness. In cases of involuntary sterilisation, it was considered permissible to use restraint, anaesthesia and even deception. Many cases involved pressure being applied by family members, most often parents, alongside clinical institutions and communities. Around 25,000 people are thought to have been sterilised under the law, which remained in force until as late as 1996 (albeit not much used after the 1970s). Some 16,500 of these sterilisations were non-consensual.

In retrospect, it seems remarkable that such a law could have been enacted in Japan just a year after the country’s new American-authored constitution provided the Japanese with extensive human rights. The Occupation authorities had the power to revise or block legislation like this, when it was put forward by the Japanese parliament, but in this case they chose to allow the law through. No doubt this had something to do with the fact that across many US states at this time eugenic sterilisation was legal.

The link in people’s minds, between Uematsu’s crime and a culture of permission when it comes to regarding disability as a social burden, was reinforced during the pre-trial stage in 2017-19. Uematsu never invoked the EPL himself, but in 2017 a documentary by Japan’s national broadcaster, NHK, about survivors of forced sterilisation brought it into the public consciousness as never before. Other survivors began to come forward, some of whom sued the Japanese government. A law was passed in 2019 providing survivors with modest compensation, but without conceding liability on the part of the state. That changed five years later, when Japan’s Supreme Court ruled that the EPL had violated constitutional provisions for individual dignity, the right to happiness, equality under the law and the prohibition of discrimination. It also made clear the state’s responsibility. Compensation was later ordered for each survivor, of 15 million yen (around £80,000).

Compounding a sense of lasting stigma towards disabled people, bereaved families in the Sagamihara case initially requested anonymity for their murdered relatives. This was carried through to the trial – against standard practice in Japan. Disability groups criticised the move as reinforcing stigma. But one relative explained their reasoning in court, charging that Japan retained a ‘deep-rooted eugenic outlook’, which led them to worry that some people might secretly share the perpetrator’s thinking. Families of intellectually disabled people who were surveyed a year after the killings reported an increase in discrimination, including online abuse.

Uematsu’s case also highlighted Japan’s continuing use of the death penalty, after his sentencing to death in March 2020. Opponents argue that capital punishment takes a particularly cruel form in Japan. It is carried out via long-drop hanging, and the condemned may only be notified of their impending execution an hour or less beforehand. Their family will typically not be notified until afterwards: executions happen in secret.

Critics also point to Japan’s conviction rate, which stands in excess of 99 per cent. This is largely down to the fact that Japanese prosecutors tend only to move forward with cases where the evidence is so strong that conviction appears all but inevitable. But two years ago, Iwao Hakamata was acquitted at retrial having spent 46 years on death row for a quadruple murder back in 1966, which it turned out he had not committed. Hakamata always maintained that he had confessed only after relentless interrogations marked by extreme physical violence. At retrial, investigators were found to have tampered with evidence in order to secure his conviction.

Uematsu’s guilt was never seriously in question. He drove to a police station in a bloodstained car and admitted to the killings. His confession was later backed by eyewitness reports, CCTV footage, and physical and forensic evidence. He is now at the Tokyo Detention House, awaiting execution. Extreme cases like his help to explain a strong popular mandate in Japan for retaining the death penalty for some murders – based on factors including motive, the manner and consequences of the killing(s), the number of victims, the social impact of the crime and the degree of remorse shown. Victims’ right to recompense, proportional to the harm suffered, remains an important moral intuition, as does the notion of atonement. The family of at least one of Uematsu’s victims demanded from the witness stand during his trial that he face the death penalty.

Popular support for capital punishment in Japan is declining only slowly. Subject to more rapid change in recent years has been the level of pressure on employers and government officials to tackle discrimination towards disabled people and take steps to make it easier for them to join the workforce. Japanese companies above a certain size were previously required to meet a 2.5 per cent employment rate for people with disabilities, a proportion that has recently risen to 2.7 per cent. The equivalent figure for national and local government is three per cent. Companies report struggling to meet these quotas, but for disability advocates it is a necessary and long-overdue struggle: accommodating staff with disabilities requires precisely the kind of curiosity about and respect for disabled lives whose absence from much of Japanese life the Uematsu case and the fallout from the EPL succeeded in highlighting.

Names have meanwhile steadily been added to a memorial cenotaph for those who died at Sagamihara, as stigma slowly ebbs away. Among the first to break anonymity was the mother of a 19-year-old victim called Miho, who could not bear to hear her daughter talked about in court using a cipher. She released a memoir about Miho’s life, so that everyone – including the man who killed her – could understand the life she had lived and the things she had loved, from Miffy through to Thomas the Tank Engine.