Japan's top court will issue a ruling on a defunct eugenics law under which the government forcibly sterilised around 16,500 people, causing decades of suffering for the victims.
The law allowed doctors to sterilise people with inheritable intellectual disabilities to"prevent the generation of poor-quality descendants". "I've spent an agonising 66 years because of the government surgery. I want my life back that I was robbed of," said Saburo Kita, who uses a pseudonym.He couldn't bring himself to tell his wife when he was married years later, only confiding in her shortly before she died in 2013.
The government, for its part,"wholeheartedly" apologised after legislation was passed in 2019 stipulating a lump-sum payment of 3.2 million yen per victim. Regional courts have mostly agreed in recent years that the eugenics law constituted a violation of Japan's constitution.