An elderly Tokyo woman learned that her reproductive capacity had been taken by a doctor’s hand only in the 1990s, more than half a century later. Called in under the name of a “physical examination,” anesthetized, and given a tubal ligation at sixteen, she was never told what medical act had been performed and, after discharge, lived a life unable to marry and bear children without anyone telling her. Under the name of the Eugenic Protection Act, such operations were carried out on about 25,000 people, one of the largest human-rights violations of postwar Japan, whose survivors began to question the state’s crime only in their seventies and eighties.

The Eugenic Protection Act and forced sterilization refer to the forced sterilizations carried out on people with disabilities, mental illness and Hansen’s disease under the Eugenic Protection Act (Act No. 156 of 1948), in force in Japan from 1948 to 1996, together with the legal regime that justified them. This entry covers the legislative background, the content of the provisions, the reality of the program, the 1996 amendment to the Maternal Protection Act, the 2019 relief law and the 2024 Supreme Court unconstitutionality ruling.

Legislative background

The act’s origin traces to the 1940 National Eugenics Act, a wartime statute modeled on Nazi Germany’s 1933 “Law for the Prevention of Hereditarily Diseased Offspring,” which institutionalized sterilization of those said to carry hereditary or mental illness. Surgeries under the wartime law numbered only in the hundreds. After the war the National Eugenics Act was reviewed for repeal under GHQ guidance but was re-legislated in the context of “population policy” as a response to postwar food shortage and population problems. The Eugenic Protection Act, enacted in June 1948, rested on three pillars: forced sterilization based on eugenic thought, the legalization of abortion for economic reasons, and contraceptive guidance for the protection of motherhood.

Articles 4, 12 and 13 in particular justified forced sterilization without the person’s consent. Where a person was judged to have a hereditary disease, mental illness or Hansen’s disease, surgery could be performed against their will by decision of the prefectural eugenic-protection review board.

The reality of forced sterilization

Over the 47 years from 1949 to 1996, the Ministry of Health, Labour and Welfare estimates that about 16,500 forced sterilizations under the act were carried out, and about 25,000 including operations with consent. Victims spanned people with intellectual, psychiatric, hearing and physical disabilities and Hansen’s disease, and women made up about 70 percent. The reality of the surgeries included collective execution at residential facilities, hospitals and special schools; inducement through false explanations such as “physical examination”; execution without consent under anesthesia; and concealed execution that did not tell the person or family the purpose. In the 1950s, just after enforcement, prefectures such as Miyagi and Hokkaido carried out over a thousand operations a year, an uneven execution with regional and temporal variation.

Survivor testimony surfaced in fragments within the women’s and disability movements of the 1980s but did not draw social attention. From the late 1990s, with the rise of the movement to repeal the act, survivors’ accounts gradually came into the open.

1996 amendment to the Maternal Protection Act

The disability and women’s movements from the 1980s continually demanded the deletion of the act’s eugenic provisions. Against a background of accumulating international human-rights norms, including the 1995 Beijing World Conference on Women, the Eugenic Protection Act was fully amended in June 1996 into the Maternal Protection Act. All eugenic provisions were deleted, and abortion and sterilization were repositioned as medical procedures based on the person’s own will. The amendment, however, only revised the wording and did not address apology or compensation for past victims; with the aging of survivors, the question of state responsibility was delayed for more than twenty years.

2019 relief law

In January 2018, a woman victim in Miyagi filed a state-compensation suit, claiming harm from forced sterilization. This prompted a succession of group suits across the country and a rapid rise in social concern. In April 2019, a cross-party legislator-initiated law, the “Act on Lump-Sum Payments to Persons Subjected to Eugenic Surgery under the Former Eugenic Protection Act” (Act No. 14 of 2019), was enacted, providing a lump sum of 3.2 million yen to each survivor. Survivor groups continued to criticize its limits as an inadequate apology, too low a sum, and an unclear relation to the statute of limitations.

2024 Supreme Court unconstitutionality ruling

On 3 July 2024, the Grand Bench of the Supreme Court delivered a landmark ruling that former Article 4 and related provisions of the Eugenic Protection Act violated Article 13 of the Constitution as an infringement of individual dignity and personal rights. The ruling held that sterilization was a grave rights violation depriving a person of reproductive capacity, that the legislative purpose (eugenic thought) was itself contrary to the Constitution, and that applying the 20-year limitation period to state-compensation claims in this case ran counter to justice.

Following the ruling, a new compensation law, the “Act on Payment of Compensation to Persons Subjected to Eugenic Surgery under the Former Eugenic Protection Act” (Act No. 70 of 2024), was enacted on 8 October 2024. It provides compensation of 15 million yen to the person who underwent surgery, 5 million yen to their spouse, and 2 million yen to a woman forced to undergo abortion; it was promulgated on 17 October 2024 and took effect three months later. The aging of survivors is severe, with many of those identified by 2025 in their late seventies to nineties, leaving the swift execution of relief as a continuing challenge.

Impact on norms surrounding sexuality

The Eugenic Protection Act problem is inscribed in history as the gravest human-rights violation within postwar Japan’s legal regime on sexuality. It is a case in which the state violated the right to sexual self-determination, reproductive freedom and bodily integrity, and it continues to influence present debate on sex education, the rights of sexual minorities and sexual-crime law. In relation to international human-rights norms (the ICCPR, the CEDAW, the Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities) the act has repeatedly drawn UN concern and recommendations, and it is internationally recognized as a symbolic case of postwar Japan’s human-rights problems.

Related terms

• Anti-Prostitution Act
• Child Prostitution and Child Pornography Act
• Sexually transmitted disease in the modern era
• Sex education
• LGBTQ law