Life in Japan: An encounter with disability and a call to action

By David McNeill–

A few years ago, I fell backwards on an unsteady summer chair in my in-laws’ garden, clipping my lower back on a ceramic plant pot. The pain crawled up my spine and by the evening I could barely walk. For the next week, I lay in bed trying to stay still. When I needed to use the bathroom, my son or wife had to half carry me there, howling in pain. My son still recalls the indignity of having to change my underwear.

Luckily, I made a full recovery from my 2022 backopalypse. But I still remember my frustration and fury at realizing that I was invalided, left dependent on others for the first time in my life by a stupid household accident. Like most people, I suppose, I took my health for granted. I’m ashamed to say that until that moment, I’d never given much thought about the needs of the disabled.

I recalled this mishap while watching the documentary “Call to Action,” about the Tokyo-based academic Mark Bookman, a postdoc fellow at Tokyo College and a consultant on accessibility issues to the International Paralympic Committee. Like the talented activist he was, Bookman had a way of making his point clearly and forcefully. “Everyone one day will become disabled,” he said in the movie.

It is therefore not only a good thing in itself to create societies that are inclusive and mindful of the needs of the physically and mentally challenged, it is in all our interests. As Bookman points out, one day we will need new knees, or hips or a hearing aid. We are all but a silly accident away from serious disability. “None of us know how we will be in 10, 20, 30 years, what type of injuries illness might befall us,” he reminds us.

It’s nice to report, then, that despite its vast size and crowded public facilities, Tokyo is becoming more inclusive. In 2022, 3,500 disabled travelers ranked the city as one of the world’s top 10 accessible destinations, alongside Paris, Amsterdam and Las Vegas. Japan’s sprawling train network is being gradually modified to cater to wheelchair users. Buildings and homes are being transformed.

As Bookman recognized, this is an area where Japan has much to offer. The country’s aging population is often framed as a burden instead of a remarkable achievement (isn’t living longer, better lives what we are all after?) but it does raise serious challenges. Old age inevitably brings a decrease in mobility and more health problems. Catering to these problems can be costly but there are imaginative solutions.

One of my reporting trips took me to Toyama city, which is a sort of accelerated version of Japan as a whole: About 30% of its residents are 65 or older and the population is falling. The city’s government built a tram system with the needs of older people in mind, and encouraged them to live close to it by subsidizing both the construction and the purchase of new housing within 500 meters of one of the new tram stops.

These initiatives have made Toyama a magnet for city planners across the world who are struggling to deal with disability issues. But not all places in Japan reach that standard. Wheelchair users often complain about restaurants or other service business that cannot accommodate them because they are too small or cluttered.

Michael Peckitt, a Japan-based academic and disability campaigner who runs the respected blog Barrier Free Japan, notes that only train stations with more than 3,000 commuters daily must have an elevator or escalator to be called “accessible.” Over half of train stations in Japan operate without an attendant. And it is pointed out that many wheelchairs are just too big for accessible toilets.

More worrying is the ill-feeling that persists against the disabled. A 2022 Cabinet Office survey found that nearly 90% of people in Japan believe discrimination and prejudice against those with disabilities persists. Less than 20% of working-age people with disabilities are employed. Why do we see so few disabled people on Japanese television, acting or presenting?

I find it shocking that the families of the 19 disabled people murdered at a care facility for disabled people in Sagamihara 2016 have tried to keep the names of their loved ones out of the media in case it fuels discrimination. Bookman’s research repeatedly noted this discrimination and how many disabled people live out their days in assisted care facilities such as Sagamihara. The alleged murderer later said he chose his victims “because they contributed nothing but misery and hardship to society.”

Bookman also pointed to how blind people were crucial to the formation of the Japanese state’s policies on the disabled. When war veterans were stripped of their welfare rights in the 1940s, for example, Japanese policymakers “needed another population of persons with disabilities to point to as potential beneficiaries of the new general welfare law.” The blind have since been relatively well looked after, in contrast to other disabled people.

Bookman’s boyhood love of cyborg anime, with its characters wielding robotic arms and superpowers, was the spark that began his journey to Japan. In 2014, he became the first person in a wheelchair to study here. He died in Tokyo in December 2022 at just 31 years of age. Among his legacies is the Glide Fund, which helps students with disabilities to do research degrees between Japan and America; and the Mark Bookman Prize, designed to “boost the career of emerging scholars researching people with disabilities or other minority groups in Japan,” set up last year with a donation from Bookman’s father.

Continuing his work would be a fitting legacy to a remarkable but all-too short life.

PROFILE:

David McNeill was born in the U.K. in 1965, and has Irish nationality. He received a doctorate from Napier University in Edinburgh, Scotland and lectured at Liverpool John Moores University, before moving to Japan in 2000. He was a Tokyo correspondent for The Independent and The Economist newspapers. He has been a professor in the Department of English Language, Communication and Cultures at University of the Sacred Heart, Tokyo, since April 2020. With Lucy Birmingham, he co-authored the book “Strong in the Rain: Surviving Japan’s Earthquake, Tsunami and Fukushima Nuclear Disaster,” published in 2012.