Reports of forced child sterilization spark anger in Japan

Campaigners in Japan reacted angrily to a government report that said children as young as nine were among the thousands subjected to forced sterilization under the eugenics law, which was not repealed until the 1990s.

According to The Guardian, a 1,400-page report presented to Parliament this week details how some 16,500 people were operated on between 1948 and 1996 without their consent under a law that was intended to “prevent the birth of low-quality offspring… and protect the life and health of the mother.” Most of the victims were women.

Another 8,000 people gave their consent – almost certainly under duress – while almost 60,000 women had abortions due to hereditary diseases.

The report states that the two nine-year-olds who were sterilized were a boy and a girl.

A long victim campaign for reparations has highlighted the Japanese state’s brutal treatment of the disabled and chronically ill in the post-World War II era.

In 2019, MPs passed a law offering 3.2 million yen ($22,800) in state compensation to each victim, an amount campaigners say does not reflect the suffering the victims have endured. The deadline to apply for the payment is April 2024, but to date, according to media reports, only 1,049 people have received the amount.

The victims of the sterilization program have been campaigning for decades seeking financial redress and recognition of the physical and mental suffering they have endured.

So far, four courts have awarded compensation to victims, but others have sided with the government, saying the 20-year statute of limitations has expired. Lawyers argued that the victims found out about the nature of their operation too late to meet the legal deadline for receiving compensation.

Germany and Sweden have taken similar action in the past but have since apologized to the victims and provided compensation. The laws of both countries were repealed decades before it happened in Japan.

Earlier this month, a high court dismissed damage claims from two women, including Junko Iizuka, who was 16 when she was taken to a clinic in northeast Japan and forced to undergo a mysterious operation that she later discovered would interfere with her ever have children.

“Eugenic surgery has robbed me of all my humble dreams of a happy marriage and children,” Iizuka, 77, told reporters this week.

Iizuka, who goes by a pseudonym and hides her face in public with a hat and mask, said the procedure ruined her most important relationship.

“As soon as I told my trusted husband that I had surgery and couldn’t have children, he left me and demanded a divorce,” she says. I became mentally ill and couldn’t work. I was diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder. Eugenic surgery has turned my life upside down.”

Following the release of the report, Chief Cabinet Secretary Hirokazu Matsuno said the government was “sincerely reflecting and deeply sorry” for the “tremendous pain” caused to victims of forced sterilization.

The report notes that sterilization under the now-defunct eugenics law, which allowed the authorities to perform the procedure on people with intellectual disabilities, mental illness or hereditary disorders to prevent the birth of “inferior” children, was a prerequisite for admission to some social institution or marriage.

Koji Niisato, a lawyer representing the victims, praised the report for revealing the horror of forced sterilization, but said it left important questions unanswered. “The report does not reveal why the law was created, why it took 48 years to amend it, or why the victims were never compensated,” Niisato says, according to the Kyodo news agency.

Iizuka, who will appeal the decision in her compensation case, said she is still suffering from trauma more than six decades after she was sterilized without her consent.

“Me and the other victims are getting older, and some have already died,” she says. I am sick and often have to go to the hospital. But we must not allow the harm that has been done to us to remain hidden in darkness.”