Whose history is this anyway?: Patient Activism and the Politics of Japan’s National Hansen’s Disease Museum

• In Event: Leprosy (癩) in East Asia: Culture, Memory, Writing and Practice in the Era of Global Health

Abstract

In 2007 the National Hansen’s Disease Museum of Japan opened in a ceremony presided over by Yanagisawa Hakuo, then Minister of Health, Labor, and Welfare. In his greeting to an audience of journalists, officials, activists, physicians, and leprosaria “residents” (as former patients prefer to be termed), Yanagisawa stated that he hoped that the museum “would become a core institution in the dissolution of prejudice and discrimination.” Yanagisawa was followed by Miyasato Mitsuo, the Chairman of the National Conference of Leprosaria Residents. Miyasato seized the opportunity to criticize the museum and declared, “the exhibits are entirely inadequate and conceal the shadow of the patients’ own testimony which is like blood spewing forth.”

These two contrasting statements—the one blandly optimistic about the resolution of a general social issue, the other angry, specific, and personal—are indicative of the tensions evoked by the museum’s portrayal of the history of leprosy in Japan. The museum was established as part of a compensation package to those who were confined under the Leprosy Prevention Law. Nonetheless, its displays met with a chorus of criticism, with many charging that the museum “white-washed” the human rights abuses perpetuated by the Japanese state within the national leprosaria. This paper explores the complicated set of interests involved in the establishment of the museum and argues that it was from out the outset shaped by an attempt to relate irreconcilable narratives—of patient suffering, of medical progress, and of the competing claims of compassion and control.

Author

• Susan Burns, University of Chicago