The Supreme Court of Japan ordered the Japanese government to compensate victims of forced sterilization after holding that the now-defunct Eugenic Protection Law was unconstitutional. The decision was a unified decision on five different appeals from Tokyo, Sendai, Sapporo, and Osaka. In its ruling, the Japanese Supreme Court held that the Eugenic Protection Law and its subsequent procedures were “significantly against the idea of respect for individual dignity and personality” and thus in violation of Article 13 of the Japanese Constitution.
The Supreme Court also criticised a 20-year statute of limitations on the right to bring compensation claims by ruling that the statute of limitations goes against “the idea of justice and fairness.” The statute of limitations prevented the lower courts from awarding compensation despite many lower court rulings criticising the Eugenic Protection Law.
Prior to the Supreme Court’s judgment, a victim’s lawyer, Koji Niisato, who is also the co-chair of the National Eugenic Protection Law Victims’ Lawyers Group, called on the Supreme Court to make “a swift decision to be made in order to restore their honor and provide relief while they’re still alive.” The lawyer cited how “the surgery took away their human dignity” and thus “it’s only natural that it will be ruled a violation of the Constitution.” One of the victims, 80-year-old Kita Saburo, affirmed that “I want to fight to the end. I don’t want to die with the desire for the country to apologize.”
The Eugenic Protection Law was enacted in 1948 to address the population explosion in post-war Japan. The law was used by the Japanese government to sterilise those with hereditary physical or mental disorders in an effort to “prevent the increase of the inferior descendants” as outlined in Article 1 of the Eugenic Protection Law. According to government reports, approximately 25,000 individuals were subject to sterilisation procedures, while 16,500 of these operations were performed without consent.
In 2019, the National Diet of Japan enacted the Law on the Payment of Lump Sum Payments To Those Who Have Undergone Eugenic Surgery, etc., Based on the Former Eugenic Protection Law, which offered a lump sum of 3.2 million Japanese yen to every sterilised victim of the Eugenic Protection Law. In the 2019 law’s preamble, the Diet offered “deepest and most sincere apologies.” to the victims of the Eugenic Protection Law and for the passage of the law in the first place.
