An article in Japan Today regarding a woman who is suing the government over being forcibly sterilized under the now-defunct eugenic protection law for mental disability (see link below) briefly mentioned Kumamoto in the context of similar forcible sterilization conducted under the Leprosy Prevention law.
Leprosy is known in Japanese as Hansen byo (ハンセン病), named after the German physician Gerhard Hansen who first identified its cause, the bacterium Mycobacterium leprae. Though it had existed in Japan since time immemorial (see Ghibili’s “Mononoke Hime,” in which those who make Lady Eboshi’s guns are lepers), the first laws which eventually led to required isolation and what came to be considered severe human rights abuses were promulgated in 1907.
Kumamoto was the site of one of five leprosariums opened in Japan, in this case by Hannah Riddell, who was selected by the Church Missionary Society in England to come to Kumamoto in 1895. The multitude of lepers who gathered to collect alms along the steps leading up to Honmyoji Temple were required to quarantine themselves in Kikuchi Keifuen hospital in Koshi Town, which still exists today (it is surrounded by a huge, beautiful park which is lovely for walks, by the way). Kikuchi Keifuen eventually became the largest sanatorium in Japan, with 2,200 beds. It wasn’t until In 1996 that the Leprosy Prevention Law was abolished.
The article linked to below is rather academic in tone but might be of interest to those curious about this era in Japanese history. For convenience, I have copy-pasted the section regarding sterilization as follows. - William
The notion that leprosy patients should be prevented from having children had been accepted by not only Japanese leprologists but by foreign missionaries involved in the care of leprosy patients. However, they considered very different approaches. Hanna Riddell, an English missionary who opened a private leprosarium Kaishun Hospital in Kumamoto, insisted sex segregation, an idea to hospitalize female and male patients separately. However, leprologist Kensuke Mitsuda argued against her approach pointing out that sex segregation was unrealistic. He wrote, “It will be natural for desperate persons to live only for the pleasure of the moment. But the pleasure they could obtain in leprosaria is no more than gambling or adultery. … Here emerged a moral anarchism which resulted in more than a dozen of babies that should not have been born”. Mitsuda concluded that sex segregation was impracticable in national leprosaria, and that sterilization of patients was more realistic and contribute patient’s welfare by permitting them to marry. Furthermore, he believed that sterilization would contribute to patient’s welfare and to leprosaria’s peace, because physicians could allow patients to marry without letting them to have children. Mitsuda began to vasectomize male patients who wished to cohabit with female patients in 1915. In the book he published in 1950, Mitsuda wrote the first vasectomy was performed with a voluntary patient, but many patients later blamed that sterilization was conducted against their wishes and that it impaired their dignity severely. Furthermore, pregnant female patients were often forced to have abortions. Former patient Shige Tamaki described regretfully her abortion. When she was found to be seven-month pregnant, leprosarium officers scolded her and strongly suggested to undergo abortion. According to Tamaki, it was a painful experience to describe. She was then seven months pregnant, and it was a female ophthalmologist who performed the abortion — or an infanticide. She clearly remembers the infant waving hands and legs on a surgical plate, a nurse covered the nose and the mouth of the infant with a piece of gauze to terminate its breathing, saying to Tamaki “it is a cute girl, and looks very much like you.” During Japanese colonization of the Korean peninsula, officials of Shorokuto Kousei-en, a Japanese-run leprosarium on Sorokdo Island near the Korean peninsula’s southwestern tip, committed patient’s sterilization as a punishment. A Korean former patient testified in a lawsuit against Japanese government in 2004, that he was vasectomize when he refused to worship a Japanese Shinto shrine in the leprosarium. He was placed in the confinement room, and forced to undergo sterilization without any explanation why he must undergo it. The vasectomy and abortion of leprosy patients had been conducted with out legal base, but both were legalized by the Eugenic Law (Yusei Hogo Hou) enacted in 1948.