| Abstrakt: |
Abstract: a1_In 1936, Mitsuda Kensuke, the Director of Nagashima Aiseien, Japan’s first national sanitarium, published an article in the sanitarium’s house journal, Aisei. Entitled “Twenty Years of Vasectomy,” it offered an assessment of the use of vasectomy on leprosy patients, a procedure Mitsuda had pioneered two decades before when he was the medical director of Zensei Hospital, one of five public sanitaria created by Japan’s first leprosy law of 1907. The tone of the piece is celebratory: the first patients to receive the procedure were, in Mitsuda’s words, “now men of 40 or 50, in middle-age, and the fact that they are even now healthy and active shows that [vasectomy] is the secret key to allowing the world’s leprosy patients of both sexes to live together and flourish together.” The rosy picture of the use of sterilization in the sanitarium offered by Mitsuda stands in sharp contrast to the assessment offered in recent scholarly work and public discourse on Japan’s leprosy policy, in which no issue looms larger than the claim that male patients were routinely, coercively, and unnecessarily sterilized, while women who became pregnant were forced to undergo abortions, sometimes in the final months of their pregnancies. The Japanese historian Fujino Yutaka, whose work has played an important role in making Japan’s leprosy prevention policy a political issue, likened the use of vasectomy in the sanitaria to the Nazi policy of sterilization. In this presentation, I want to reconsider the sexual and reproductive policies deployed within the sanitaria. My argument is that the policy of sterilization cannot be understood either as completely voluntary (the claim of sanitarium doctors at the time) or overtly coerced (the view that has come to prevail). |
