TOKYO — Fumie Suzuki was 21 when she was found to have leprosy. Her family locked her in a room and slid her food through the doorway. After a year, she was exiled to an isolated leprosarium.
Alone, she made the journey to a colony to which no roads led, stumbling on her weak, nerve-damaged legs. Her mother's parting words were: "Never come back. And die quickly." But more than 50 years after being left to die, she recently celebrated her liberation, as Japan finally became the last industrialized nation to free its lepers and close its colonies.
"We were born free, but when we got leprosy, that was taken away from us," said Miyoji Morimoto, head of the Tamazenseien Patients Assn., a group named after the leprosarium they were banished to.
Wearing a white wedding tie at a recent celebration of the lepers' newfound liberty, he declared: "At last, we have become like normal handicapped people. Now we are members of society."
Behind Suzuki and Morimoto's triumphant redemption, and that of thousands of others like them locked up in Japan's leprosariums for half a century, is an astounding saga of fear and social bias, bureaucratic bungling and medical cliquishness, even prewar military ideals about purifying the Japanese race. Japan continued to isolate its lepers decades after the rest of the industrialized world had freed theirs, ignoring a breakthrough medical cure accepted by all other nations.
Yet their tale also reflects unremitting courage and heroism--particularly by Fujio Otani, the doctor who fought the medical and bureaucratic establishment for decades to win dignity, and ultimately freedom, for Japan's lepers.
Japan Stands Alone
Throughout the ages, leprosy was considered one of humanity's most deadly diseases, and the afflicted were banished from society. But when Promin, an effective cure, became widely available in the 1950s, leprosariums were shut down in all developed countries--except Japan.
Here, until this spring, 5,800 people diagnosed with leprosy before 1953--the year by which almost all of the patients had been incarcerated--were still locked up in Japan's 15 leprosariums. They were held in the belief, long discounted by the international medical community, that leprosy is both highly contagious and hereditary.
In consultation with medical specialists, the Japanese government decided early in this century that those with the defective genes and disfiguring disease had to be isolated and stamped out of the Japanese race. The Leprosy Prevention Law, originally promulgated in 1907 and steadily strengthened until its final incarnation in 1953, required that leprosy patients be quarantined.
"This law was made when Japan was a militarist nation, and the doctors who headed the leprosariums were all militarists," said Kaoru Matsumoto, who spent decades in a leprosarium. "They saw leprosy as Japan's shame. They thought, 'We have to protect the superb Japanese race from leprosy.' They didn't trust medical knowledge. They believed, 'Until the last one is killed off, they must be isolated.' "
In the years leading up to World War II, tens of thousands of Japanese lepers were rounded up by the national police and put into leper colonies. For half a century, Japan's lepers were virtually wiped out of the national consciousness--forgotten by the medical establishment, the government and their own families.
Otani put his own career on the line by relentlessly fighting for better treatment of lepers, more public money for them and repeal of the law that imprisoned them. Finally, in March, Otani's efforts paid off: A bill erasing the Leprosy Prevention Law and setting the patients free passed the Japanese parliament.
"As long as the Leprosy Prevention Law was still on the books, I knew that the prejudice would never disappear," Otani said. "I vowed to fight until the law was repealed--to prove the law was unnecessary."
It was a handful of strong-willed crusaders--some blind and paralyzed, others in wheelchairs--who came to the recent gathering to celebrate their freedom and thank the man who listened when no one else would.
"He helped us. Without him, this would have been impossible," said Matsumoto, 78, raising his glass in gnarled fingers in a toast.
Barred Behind a Moat
Matsumoto was sent to Tamazenseien 61 years ago, when he was 17. In those days, conditions were grim. A dense forest hid patients from the eyes of passersby, and a moat surrounding the colony prevented escapes. Upon entry, new inmates were stripped of their possessions and presented with special leper colony currency and inmate pajamas. Patients were crammed eight to 10 in tiny, dirty rooms. Doctors and medical aides kept their distance, and the strong patients cared for the weak.
"The conditions were horrible. The doctors and nurses wouldn't come near us. We did everything, from growing and preparing food to burying the dead," Matsumoto said through lips slackened by paralysis.
