The stabbing deaths of 19 disabled people in their sleep in July and the silence surrounding their identities are forcing Japan to grapple with its attitudes toward physically and cognitively impaired persons, less than four years before Tokyo hosts the Paralympics.
Almost nothing except their genders and ages — ranging from 19 to 70 — has been made public about those who died when a man went on a stabbing spree at a facility for disabled people in Sagamihara town, southwest of Tokyo, killing 19 and wounding 26 others.
The silence has sparked debate about the need for change in a society where people with disabilities can still suffer stigma and shame.
Photo: Reuters
“It is true that some may not have wanted their children to be subjected to public scorn,” said Takashi Ono, stepfather of 43-year-old Kazuya, a long-time resident of the Tsukui Yamauri-en facility who survived multiple stabbing wounds in the attack.
Ono and his wife, Chikiko, are among the few relatives who have gone public. None of the families of the dead have done so.
“In Japan, disabled people are discriminated against so the families wanted to hide them,” Ono said in an interview, adding he and Chikiko had always been open about their son, who has autism and cognitive disabilities.
Japan has made progress in its treatment of the disabled. It ratified a UN rights treaty in 2014 and a new anti-discrimination law took effect in April. Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe regularly mentions the disabled when speaking of plans for a more inclusive society to cope with a shrinking population.
However, people with disabilities, especially cognitive impairments, can still suffer from stigma and — unlike in many advanced Western countries — their families share the shame.
In a statement released to Japanese media after July’s stabbing spree, police in Kanagawa Prefecture, where the facility is located, said that they did not release the victims’ names because it was a facility for cognitively disabled people and they needed to protect the families’ privacy.
They also said the victims’ families had requested special consideration about how the matter was reported.
Seiko Noda, a prominent ruling party lawmaker who has suffered abuse on the Internet for “wasting taxpayers’ money” on medical care for her five-year-old disabled son Masaki, was not surprised that the Sagamihara victims’ families chose anonymity.
“Some families are positive and try to change the world by being open about their disabled children. But the ‘silent majority’ still has a negative view and does not want it known that they have disabled children,” Noda, 56, said.
Victims’ families likely also worried about being accused of abandoning their relatives by institutionalizing them, experts said.
The identity blackout stands in stark contrast to coverage of other Japanese victims of mass killings, including seven who died in a July attack by extremist militants in Bangladesh.
“Clearly, there is a difference in the treatment of those with disabilities and those without disabilities,” said Kiyoshi Harada of the Japan Disability Forum, a non-governmental organization.
“We cannot tell what sort of lives the victims led, what their hobbies were, what their existence was like.”
The suspect in the Sagamihara killings, Satoshi Uematsu, had been briefly committed to hospital as a danger to himself and others after writing to a lawmaker advocating euthanasia for the severely disabled and outlining a plan for mass murder.
Some who work with disabled people worry ordinary Japanese share Uematsu’s extreme views, but experts say they are not mainstream.
Neither euthanasia nor assisted suicide is legal in Japan. Efforts to pass a law protecting doctors who withhold life-prolonging care with the patient’s consent have stalled in the face of stiff opposition from disabilities rights groups, who fear it could be a first step to legalizing euthanasia.
Those with cognitive disabilities, like residents of the Sagamihara facility, face greater discrimination than the physically impaired, who activists say have seen major progress in recent decades.
Disabled people in rural areas also face greater hurdles to integration than residents of cities, where there is trend toward care in small group homes away from large, isolated institutions that have increasingly come under criticism.
“Some things do trickle down from the big city, but it takes a while,” said Suzanne Kamata, an American living in Tokushima, about 500km west of Tokyo, whose 17-year-old daughter is deaf and has cerebral palsy.
Preparations for the 2020 Paralympics are providing impetus for an improved barrier-free environment, at least in Tokyo, where Tokyo Metro aims to have all subway stations equipped with multi-purpose elevators by March 2019, up from 81 percent now.
Optimists say the debate itself over the Sagamihara victims’ anonymity gives cause for hope.
“It was a bitter incident, but it is important that it is becoming a trigger for people to think about this seriously,” Japan Disability Forum’s Harada said.
Far from the violence ravaging Haiti, a market on the border with the Dominican Republic has maintained a welcome degree of normal everyday life. At the Dajabon border gate, a wave of Haitians press forward, eager to shop at the twice-weekly market about 200km from Haiti’s capital, Port-au-Prince. They are drawn by the market’s offerings — food, clothing, toys and even used appliances — items not always readily available in Haiti. However, with gang violence bad and growing ever worse in Haiti, the Dominican government has reinforced the usual military presence at the border and placed soldiers on alert. While the market continues to
An image of a dancer balancing on the words “China Before Communism” looms over Parisian commuters catching the morning metro, signaling the annual return of Shen Yun, a controversial spectacle of traditional Chinese dance mixed with vehement criticism of Beijing and conservative rhetoric. The Shen Yun Performing Arts company has slipped the beliefs of a spiritual movement called Falun Gong in between its technicolored visuals and leaping dancers since 2006, with advertising for the show so ubiquitous that it has become an Internet meme. Founded in 1992, Falun Gong claims nearly 100 million followers and has been subject to “persistent persecution” in
ONLINE VITRIOL: While Mo Yan faces a lawsuit, bottled water company Nongfu Spring and Tsinghua University are being attacked amid a rise in nationalist fervor At first glance, a Nobel prize winning author, a bottle of green tea and Beijing’s Tsinghua University have little in common, but in recent weeks they have been dubbed by China’s nationalist netizens as the “three new evils” in the fight to defend the country’s valor in cyberspace. Last month, a patriotic blogger called Wu Wanzheng filed a lawsuit against China’s only Nobel prize-winning author, Mo Yan (莫言), accusing him of discrediting the Communist army and glorifying Japanese soldiers in his fictional works set during the Japanese invasion of China. Wu, who posts online under the pseudonym “Truth-Telling Mao Xinghuo,” is seeking
‘SURPRISES’: The militants claim to have successfully tested a missile capable of reaching Mach 8 and vowed to strike ships heading toward the Cape of Good Hope Yemen’s Houthi rebels claim to have a new, hypersonic missile in their arsenal, Russia’s state media reported on Thursday, potentially raising the stakes in their attacks on shipping in the Red Sea and surrounding waterways against the backdrop of Israel’s war with Hamas in the Gaza Strip. The report by the state-run RIA Novosti news agency cited an unidentified official, but provided no evidence for the claim. It comes as Moscow maintains an aggressively counter-Western foreign policy amid its grinding war on Ukraine. However, the Houthis have for weeks hinted about “surprises” they plan for the battles at sea to counter the