For the Purity of the Nation: Ogawa Masako and the Gendered Ethics of Spring on the Small Island (Kojima no haru)

Hansen’s disease has a long history in Japan, but it was not directly targeted by legislation until Law Number 11, the “Law Concerning the Prevention of Leprosy” (Rai Yobō ni Kan Suru Ken), was passed in 1907.1 The main object of the law was the confinement of Hansen’s disease sufferers with no family or residence, such as itinerants who begged at temples and shrines.2 Thus patients who received care at home were exempt from quarantine.3 To treat vagrant patients, Law Number 11 divided the nation’s prefectures into five groups and established joint-prefectural public hospitals that began accepting sufferers in 1909.4 Mitsuda Kensuke (1876–1964) was Japan’s most influential leprologist and a proponent of isolation policies. Originally employed in a small isolation ward in a Tokyo hospital, he later worked at Zensei Hospital (Zensei Byōin, today Tama Zenshō-en), at the time one of the prefectural hospitals in Tokyo. He lobbied the Japanese government to establish a national facility on an island, based on similar quarantine hospitals in the Philippines and Hawai‘i. At Mitsuda’s urging, the Japanese government established the first national sanatorium, Nagashima Aisei-en (hereafter Aisei-en), on an island in the Inland Sea. Mitsuda became the first director of the institution.