In July 2010 the Japanese publisher Koseisha published poetry, essays and fiction by persons affected by leprosy dating from the 1920s in a ten-volume collection. Kathryn Tanaka, a PhD student in the Department of East Asian Languages and Civilization at the University of Chicago here shares her knowledge of some of these writings.

 How many authors’ writings are included?

There are well over 100 authors featured in this collection, although it contains no more than one short poem or essay of many of the authors.

 Does the collection contain all of the writings written in sanatoria? If not all were included what was the selection criteria?

It does not contain all of the writings by hospital residents. Residents within the hospital system produced a vast amount of literature and current research has not yet begun to catalogue all of the material available.

While I cannot speak concretely about the selection process, it is clear the editors chose to heavily feature works by authors who had some audience outside the hospitals. They also feature a number of selections from writers who may not have been well-known in literary circles around Japan, but were active in literary groups within the hospitals and were published either in the hospital magazine or in smaller, literary magazines published within the institution.

 How were these writings gathered together? Where were the pieces of writing?

These writings cannot be found in a centralised archive. They are scattered around Japan in many different hospital locations, which made their collection very difficult.

In most cases, the patients themselves preserved the writings. All of the hospitals in Japan have at least one library for use by residents. Many of them also have archives containing papers from the Residents Association, and some have other archives affiliated with specific groups that were active within the hospitals.

As you know, Hansen’s disease has a long history in Japan, although prior to
the Meiji period (1868-1912), the illness was not targeted by a coherent and strictly enforced set of legal codes. The first national measure directly addressing Hansen’s disease prevention, the Law Concerning the Prevention of Leprosy, was passed by the Diet in 1907. The main object of the law was the hospitalization of sufferers with no family or place to stay, such as those who begged at temples and shrines and it called for the establishment of five joint-prefectural leprosaria for treatment. The law was revised and strengthened in 1931 as the Leprosy Prevention Law. Under this legislation, national hospitals were created and all persons diagnosed with Hansen’s disease were required to be quarantined.

Poetry circles formed in every hospital soon after the leprosy institutions opened. By 1919, most hospitals also published an official hospital magazine that often featured sections of patient writing. While some of this material still exists, a great deal of it has been lost in floods, fires, and other natural disasters over the course of the twentieth century. Indeed, given the conditions within the hospitals during the first half of the twentieth century, the amount of material that is left to us today is amazing.

 What was the make-up of the editorial group?

The editorial group was made up of Ôoka Makoto (b. 1931), a well-known Japanese poet and literary critic; Kaga Otohiko (b.1929), a famous novelist and critic, Tsurumi Shunsuke (b. 1922), a noted historian and philosopher, and Otani Fujio (1924-2010), a senior health ministry official and renowned advocate for patients’ rights. Three residents of Tama Zensho Hospital in Tokyo joined the project as editorial advisors. These men were Kunimoto Mamoru (1926-2008), an author and leader in the Patients’ Rights Movement and the lawsuit against the Japanese government; Fuyu Toshiyuki (1935-2002), a noted author and plaintiff in the lawsuit against the government, and Yamashita Michinosuke (b. 1929), an author and the former resident librarian and archivist at the Tokyo Hospital. Yamashita and Kunimoto in particular were the earliest activists in preserving patient writing and other materials associated with life in the hospitals.

 Are there unifying themes across the writings?

“Hansen’s Disease literature” is defined by Arai Yuki in his recent book Kakuri no bungaku: Hansen-byô ryôyôsho no jiko hyôgen-shi (Literature of Quarantine: A History of Self-Expression in Hansen’s disease Sanatoria) as literature produced by people with Hansen’s disease living in hospitals under the compulsory quarantine system pursued by the Japanese government. The themes that unite works are both the experience of living with Hansen’s disease and living under compulsory segregation from society. The emotional trauma of institutionalisation, separation from family, and being cut off from society is a much more prominent theme than the illness in many patients’ work. Like Arai, I think any definition of Hansen’s Disease Literature and its themes must account not only for the physical, but also the social experience of the illness.

 I have read that these writings by persons affected by leprosy were felt to constitute a specific genre and that the collective term “Leprosy Literature” was coined towards the end of the 1930s? Can you define “Leprosy Literature”?

I think Arai’s definition is very astute and it is the one I use in my work as well, although other critics have defined the genre to include writing by doctors about their treatment of the illness or popular fiction and detective stories that took Hansen’s disease as their theme. While I think these works can be read in interesting parallel with Hansen’s Disease Literature, I don’t think they constitute Hansen’s Disease Literature.

The term “Leprosy Literature” itself was first used in the late 1920s and early 1930s by Dr Uchida Mamoru, but it wasn’t widely used other than in hospital magazines until Kawabata Yasunari promoted Hôjô Tamio  After the publication of Hôjô’s “Inochi no shoya” (Life’s First Night) in 1936, writings by patients were felt to constitute a separate literary category.

While the term “Leprosy Literature” was used within the hospitals in the 1920s, the term did not become well-known amongst literary critics in Japan until Kawabata Yasunari (1899-1972) used the term in his promotion of Hôjô Tamio’s (1914-1937) work. It was then that literary critics began to use the term in their discussions of patient writing.

 Can the writings be seen as protests against the confinement of persons with leprosy for life and against the stigmatisation they experienced? 

This collection contains a very large, very broad group of writings by an incredibly diverse group of people, and their writing expresses a variety of viewpoints. In addition to their diversity, patient writing until the mid-1950s was subject to stringent censorship before it was allowed to leave the hospital. Under those circumstances, it is difficult to read much of the pre-1950s writing as explicitly works of protest. Not only would works of a political nature not have passed through the censorship process, but their authors would have faced punishment by hospital officials.
I do think there’s an element of confronting social stigma in writers like Hôjô Tamio, and I think such work has been over simplified. There’s a tendency to either dismiss patient writing as propaganda or over-valorise it as protest. There are a variety of complicated factors that make viewing this literature as entirely one thing or another very problematic.

Another complicating factor in generalising Hansen’s Disease Literature is the fact that some patients write in support of the confinement system as a way to escape the stigma they were experiencing. There were people who were grateful to the hospital, because it gave them a place to live free from persecution from their neighbours.

Patient writing was also used as propaganda for government quarantine policies. This is an important part of Hansen’s Disease Literature, but it has not been given a great deal of attention by critics and scholars.

That said, literature in the post-Promin era of treatment in Japan, when the illness was curable, is much more explicitly politically engaged, and the writers often directly confront issues of confinement, stigma, and other human rights violations. In my work, I consider literature written after the advent of Promin to be a new kind of literature; what was “Leprosy Literature” in the 1930s becomes “Hansen’s Disease Literature” after around 1948. The shift is an important one in terms of the political engagement of the literature, and I don’t think scholars have given it enough attention. I think it is fair to call a portion of post-Promin writing an explicit act of protest.

 How much did the publication of in-house journals including poetry and prose by residents of each of the sanitoria in Japan inspire persons affected by leprosy to write? How far can it be attributed to self-motivation to write do you think?

I think it was a source of great inspiration, as were the poetry and literature clubs formed in each hospital. When I visited residents of the hospitals in Japan, I was told stories of how the groups would gather together and hold competitions to write the best poem or best short story. The winner of the contest would receive a stamped postcard to submit their work to a popular magazine outside the hospital.

The in-house journals certainly encouraged literary production and solicited manuscripts, and being published in these journals did lend the writer a certain amount of intellectual cachet within the hospital. The urge to write, however, predated these journals and I think the poetry circles, and the production of literature as a social act within the community was probably just as important.

 Did literary competitions and their prizes run by the sanitoria further inspire so many to write?

I think the annual literary issue of the hospital magazines was a great inspiration for patients to write. As I stated above, there was a certain cachet in being chosen for publication, particularly in the annual literary issues.

 Japanese novelists and writers apparently helped have some of the writings published outside the sanitoria – who do you consider played a key role in this respect? 

There have been quite a few famous Japanese authors who have promoted patient writing. Kawabata Yasunari, the first Japanese winner of the Nobel Prize in literature, is certainly the foremost figure in this regard. Other celebrated authors, however, such as novelist Abe Tomoji (1903-1973) and poet Yosano Akiko (1878-1942) have also promoted patient writing. More recently, the poet Ôe Mitsuo (1906-1991) also took an interest in Hansen’s Disease Literature.

 What do you know about Poems of Homesickness published in 1939? It seems that besides including writing by persons affected by leprosy, established authors and sociologists expressed their opinions in it about the “meaning”, “future” and “outlook” of “Leprosy Literature”. 

It is a book that collects a variety of materials relating to “Leprosy Literature.”  There are essays by doctors about patient writing, followed by sections of short stories, essays and criticism, poetry/tanka/haiku/children’s poems, and ending with a section of criticism on HD literature containing pieces by a well-known psychiatrist named Shikiba Ryûzaburô (1898-1965); Kawabata Yasunari; an editor of Yamazakura (Mountain Cherries, the hospital magazine of the Tokyo hospital), Muto Jirô (dates unknown); Yusa Toshihiko (dates unknown), a sociologist and representative of the Mitsui Charitable Foundation; Tada Sadahisa (dates unknown), a representative of the Leprosy Prevention Association, and Nitto Shûichi (dates unknown), a doctor who briefly worked at the Zenshô Hospital in Tokyo.

It’s a fascinating book for several reasons. First, it is the earliest collection of patient writing put together by someone who wasn’t officially affiliated with a Hansen’s disease hospital. Shikiba Ryûzaburô, the editor of the volume, had an interest in mental illness and artistic genius and he became acquainted with Hôjô Tamio’s work through his brother, who was an editor of a magazine that published Hôjô’s work. Indeed, the critical essays in the book focus primarily on Hôjô, and the book takes its title from one of his short stories (this story is reprinted as the very first one in this book).

The collection also very clearly frames “leprosy literature” as a medical production. The texts are presented as primarily therapeutic for patients, and are examined within the context of the hospital.

 In her article Making Illness into Identity: Writing “Leprosy Literature” in Modern Japan, Susan Burns notes: “Leprosarium officials clearly sought to encourage, control and use literary production as a means to shape how the leprosaria were understood, by those who lived within them – and those who did not”. What are your views on this observation?

In the interest of full disclosure Susan Burns is one of the readers on my dissertation committee.

I think this is a fair observation, in that medical officials did seek to control patient writing and influence how it was understood. I’d like to point out, however, that this does not always mean they succeeded. In my dissertation, I argue that doctors sought to control and impose certain ways of reading onto patient writing, but that authors like Hôjô were still able to use literature to have their own voice to represent themselves outside the hospital. The medical establishment had a vested interest in insisting writing was therapeutic rather than literary, and imposing that frame of reading upon the texts. Indeed, I argue it was writing like Hôjô‘s that exposed alternative understandings of the official narrative of what the hospital was that became a threat and caused doctors to more tightly control patient writing.

 Can you share with readers your favourite piece of writing in this collection? What is it about? Why do you like it so much? Is there another piece that you feel is particularly noteworthy? Again, why is it so noteworthy/interesting?

There are many wonderful pieces of writing in this collection, and it’s difficult to choose just one favourite, so I’m afraid this might be a bit long.

The book contains several short stories by Hôjô Tamio, and as you may have guessed, I am partial to his work. His most famous piece, and arguably the most well-known work of Hansen’s disease literature, opens the volume. It is “The First Night of Life” (“Inochi no shoya”). It describes a young man arriving at Zensei Hospital for admittance.  The main character, Oda, has contemplated suicide many times between his diagnosis and his institutionalization and isolation from society. The story takes places during his first night in the hospital, in a ward for serious cases, and the issues Oda faces as he tries find a way to acclimatize to life within this hospital. This story is the focus of the second chapter of my dissertation. It’s a remarkable piece of literature that is too often read as a historical or social document rather than a work of fiction.

I also enjoy Hôjô’s other short stories, particularly “Raiin jutai” (“Pregnancy in the Leprosarium”) and “Raikazoku” (“A Leper Family”), where he touches on the consequences of isolation on such things as families and pregnancies. Through his stories, and despite the censorship they underwent, we get a glimpse of a macabre hospital that stands in sharp contrast to the image of the hospital medical officials promoted.

The collection also contains several pieces by the patient activist Shima Hiroshi (1918-2003), who was really the catalyst for the lawsuit against the government. He edited a literary journal named Kazan Chitai (Lava belt), and his stories are beautifully crafted pieces about life in the post-war hospital. His works are explicit acts of protest, and they deserve further attention.

Short stories, however, are actually the exception, and it is more common for residents to write poetry. The Collected Works features an expansive collection of patient poetry, including free verse, haiku, tanka, and senryû. My favorite poets are Shimada Shakusô (1904-1938), a haiku and tanka poet who lived in Kyûshû’s Kikuchi Keifû-en hospital and Akashi Kaijin (1901-1939), a haiku and tanka poet hospitalized in the first national sanatorium, Nagashima Aisei-en. Itô Tamotsu (1913-1963) is also a wonderful poet who deserves more attention.

I also really enjoy the poems of Tsuda Haruko from Kikuchi and Tô Kazuko (b. 1929) from Ôshima Seishô-en. Apart from the beauty of their verses, there are not many female writers of Hansen’s Disease Literature and I think their voices are important because they’re so rare. 

Tô Kazuko also has the distinction of being one of only four authors of Hansen’s Disease Literature to have a set of her own Collected Works published and she’s the only woman. The other three are Shimada Shakusô, Hôjô Tamio, and Akashi Kaijin. The three men had their Collected Works published in the 1930s, but Tô’s volumes are quite recent, coming out in 2006.

 Among the authors whose work is in this collection, are there any who are still writing today? Can you name some of them and tell readers what they are writing about now?

There are many residents who are still writing today. Tô Kazuko is still living in Ôshima Seishô-en. Her most recent book came out in 2008. Fujita Sanshirô (1926-), a patient activist who lives in Kuriu Rakusen-en in Gumma Prefecture, just published a new collection of poetry and essays. His work is focused on combating the social stigma of Hansen’s disease and he does so through poignant reflections on everyday life. His poems are free verse, very accessible, yet also very touching. He’s also very active in helping scholars in their research on Hansen’s disease, and I owe a tremendous debt of gratitude to him.

Murakoshi Kaseki (1928-) also lives in Kuriu, and he just published a new volume of haiku in 2010. His poems are very delicate and have been very well-received among the literary critics in Japan.

NB: This collection is available in Japanese only.

The views expressed in this interview are those of the interviewee and do not necessarily represent those of ILEP. ILEP accepts no responsibility for errors or omissions or the consequences thereof.   

 

Categories: Japan