As Tokyo prepares for the 2020 Paralympics, victims of Japan’s forced sterilisation programme are fighting for justice.
When Kikuo Kojima returns to Japan’s Nakae Hospital, the memories come flooding back — of isolation, electric shocks, beatings, starvation and finally, surgery.
«They pinned me down, took my pants off, and when I tried to resist, they gave me an injection in my arm… the anaesthetic didn’t work. It was excruciating,» he recalls.
Kojima was one of 25,000 people who were sterilised in Japan under the government’s Eugenic Protection Law.
The law was introduced after World War II to prevent the birth of children who the government deemed «inferior». This included people with physical disabilities and mental illness, who for decades have faced discrimination and isolation in Japanese society.
The Hokkaido region, where Nakae Hospital is located, has the highest number of forced sterilisations in the country.
«I remember what the nurse said clearly: ‘Mr Kojima, you have schizophrenia. You have a disability. People like you should not have children’,» Kojima recalls.
He was left physically disabled after suffering from polio as a child, but Kojima says he was never formally diagnosed with a mental illness.
He was admitted to the hospital by police when he was 18, after arguing with his foster parents over money.
«The nurse said I was at a psychiatric hospital. Why a psychiatric hospital? I had never hurt anyone… I didn’t think I had a mental illness… And when I tried to resist, they tasered me,» Kojima says.
While there, he says he witnessed other patients being taken for sterilisation surgery, some as young as 14 years old.
Not long after his own sterilisation procedure, Kojima escaped the hospital. But he says he couldn’t escape the shame he felt over what happened and kept his it a secret for 57 years.
«People with disabilities … we all have the right to live… They stripped us of this right,» he says.
Kojima finally revealed to his wife what happened to him after another sterilisation victim launched a case against the Japanese government.
Now Kojima is also taking legal action, demanding an apology and compensation.
«I hope more people will get to know there are people like us. And I hope the same thing will not happen in other countries… We have to make some noise,» he says.
