Keywords

Introduction

A disability-based approach to history (disability history) gives us perspectives on historical ideas of disability in modern East Asian societies. This chapter will emphasize three main areas: (1) disability, science, and medicine; (2) disability, law, and activism; and (3) disability and popular culture. In this chapter, the modern period is taken to mean the nineteenth century and thereafter, and the focus will be on China, Japan, and South Korea (where “Korea” instead of “South Korea” is mentioned, it refers to the Korean peninsula and its inhabitants).

The social model in disability studies informs the general understanding of disability in this chapter. This model recognizes that society creates disability, and that disability is inseparable from the environment or system in which it is created (Adams et al., 2015). This idea about the social and political construction of disability can also be incorporated into the broad understanding that a society and its culture sustain disability (Waldschmidt, 2018).

This chapter’s historical approach validates the relationship between disability and society and between disability and culture. It will become clear that in each modern East Asian society, like in other modern societies around the world, the social, political, ideological, and medical realms of culture have defined disability as a concept and as an experience.

Disability and Its Contexts

  1. 1.

    Disability, Science, and Medicine

The classification of disability in East Asia today generally recognizes the categories of physical, mental, and intellectual disabilities. However, in the premodern (pre-nineteenth century) eras, there was no standard idea of what made up disability nor a designated category of disability in the scientific or medical vocabulary. What we think of as disability today has to be reinterpreted through the lens of the history of medicine of those eras, because disability was regarded as disease and illness. This section surveys the relationship between disability and medicine in premodern East Asia and the relationship between disability and science and medicine in modern East Asia from the nineteenth century through the early twentieth century.

China was the main source of medical thought and practices in premodern East Asia. Through long periods of intercultural exchange, Japan and Korea developed their own styles of medicine based on Chinese sources. The Yellow Emperor’s Inner Classic, which dates from the first century BCE or so, was one of the earliest known medical texts in China (Scheid, 2015). That text had tremendous influence on medical thought not only in China but also in Japan and Korea over many centuries. We should note that varieties of Chinese medicine developed within the respective traditions of China, Japan, and Korea (Cook, 2020; Suh, 2017; Trambaiolo, 2013).

The Yellow Emperor’s Inner Classic represents the traditional model of Chinese medical thought. The human body was described as a system of “organs” and “viscera” (we would recognize some of them as organs in modern human anatomy) linked through networks of conduits. Blood and qi (breath) flowed along these conduits, and health depended on their flow (Scheid, 2015). Illness could arise, for example, when there was “fullness” or “emptiness” (overabundance or deficit) of qi in the organs and viscera or when “winds” that caused disease invaded the body (Kuriyama, 2006). The human body was also understood to be more than a closed, corporeal body in many ways, because it embodied elements of the cosmos and functioned in synchronization with seasons and cycles of change (Kuriyama, 2006; Scheid, 2015). Even today, these interrelated concepts of health and illness continue to be important characteristics of traditional medical thought in East Asia.

The understanding of mental disability, among other disabilities, is one important example that shows how the frameworks of understanding disability changed as East Asian societies evolved. Although current studies of disability urge us to delink disability from medical perspectives, studying mental disability in earlier time periods, in fact, must involve studying the language used in medical sources from those times. In premodern China, medical theories outlined various causes of mental illness. Before the eleventh century, for example, mental illness was thought to be caused by “winds” that harmed the body (Baum, 2018). This is clear evidence of the influence of medical sources such as The Yellow Emperor’s Inner Classic. Later medical theories, such as those of the Qing period (1644–1911), emphasized the role of mucus and fire in the chest in causing disorders that could affect the heart, which was the site of the body’s “mind” (Baum, 2018). Because the “mind” was believed to be inseparable from the physical body, and from the vital flow of blood and qi around the body, treatments of mental illness not only aimed to break down mucus but also to restore the balance and flow of life’s essence in the body’s system.

Medical scholars of premodern Japan and Korea also employed the medical vocabulary of Chinese medical scholars in their approaches to mental illness. In Japan, during the Tokugawa period (1600–1868), some medical scholars linked the stagnation of ki (the Japanese reading of qi) in the body to emotional and mood changes and to irregular and even immoral behaviors (Kitanaka, 2010). This manifestation of psychological, behavioral patterns hints at clinical symptoms of what could have been mental depression. There were scholars at that time who argued that stagnated ki led to the dysfunction of the liver, the organ that was understood to control emotions: when stagnation set in, it could fuel “fire” in the liver and destabilize a person’s emotions (Daidoji, 2013). In Korea, during the Chosŏn period (1392–1910), there were also scholars who theorized mental illness as illness caused by “fire,” and the general population knew mental illness as “fire illness” caused by unrestrained emotions (Yoo, 2016). It is common to find in popular religions across premodern East Asia the association of mental illness with spirit possession, and popular cures for mental illness included religious exorcism through shamanistic rituals (Kang, 2006; Yoo, 2016).

Psychiatry was introduced from Europe and North America (global, cultural regions commonly referred to in the scholarship as the “West”) to East Asia in the late nineteenth century, and its introduction is often seen as a turning point in the history of mental disability. Psychiatry was one of the representative branches of the new, Western medicine that catalyzed the acceptance of medicine based on modern human anatomy. While this may mean to some people that mental disability was “discovered” in the modern era of Western medicine, we may also argue that mental disability had existed for a long time but emerged as a new disability when the medical vocabulary and references changed.

In China, during the Republican period (1912–1949), psychiatry transformed the ways mental illness was treated. Psychiatry reoriented medical thought by emphasizing the brain, not the heart, as the organ of cognition, and clinical therapies were developed around this new psychiatric model (Baum, 2018). At the same time, traditional medical beliefs were not completely effaced by Western medicine, as many people found ways to appropriate familiar, historical practices. One notable social feature of that period was the founding of public mental institutions (“asylums”), such as the Beijing Municipal Asylum (Baum, 2018). As Baum (2018) points out, the early Republican Chinese penal code of 1912 was intended to delineate the place of criminals with mental illnesses in the nation’s legal system. Public mental institutions offered a solution to shelter and confine them, and because those institutions were often poorly staffed and underfunded, the level of care was generally poor. Through social and legal measures to contain mental illness, government officials became more involved than before in the surveillance of deviant behaviors (Baum, 2018). Even so, the family remained the core unit of caretaking. This situation was quite similar in Japan as well.

Japan in the early Meiji period (1868–1912) took the lead in East Asia in adopting psychiatry. This was because Japan started to modernize its industries according to Western standards before the rest of East Asia could. The Japanese government studied the German model of medical education and spearheaded the reinvention of medicine in Japan (Kim 2014). Like in China, psychiatry in Japan overturned the traditional understanding of human anatomy and privileged new methods of investigating mental illness as psychological, cognitive disorder. Japanese students traveled abroad to Germany and Austria to study psychiatry and returned to Japan to take up the reins of teaching psychiatry (Kim 2018). Hospitals were new institutions of the Meiji period (Burns, 1997), as were mental institutions (Kim 2018). In the early twentieth century, psychiatry had become part of mainstream medicine, and at hospitals, experimental treatments of mental illness, such as shock therapies, were tested on patients (Suzuki, 2010).

Japan used laws to organize the national and local approaches to mental illness. The Custody Law Regarding People with Mental Illness of 1900 outlined the family’s obligation to protect family members with mental illness. However, the outcome was often deplorable because, as a standard practice, many families inhumanely confined those family members in cages at home (Nakamura, 2013). Later, in 1919, the Mental Hospitals Act aimed to offer public support for people with mental illness through hospitals (Kim 2018). The Japanese government also tried to reform the medical system in Korea, after Japan’s annexation of Korea in 1910 (Japan’s colonial rule of Korea ended in 1945 after World War II). One of the Japanese government’s tasks was to oversee the psychiatric care of people with mental illness through the Government-General Hospital (Yoo, 2016). However, due to limited resources, most people with mental illness in Korea, and in Japan, had to be cared for through their own means at home, and treatments at mental institutions did not replace home-based care.

From the late nineteenth century, ideology in East Asia also played a major role in influencing ideas about able-bodiedness and hence ideas about who was able-bodied. In this regard, the ideology was often flawed and prejudiced, because it claimed to use science to prove why some categories of people were more able than others. The rhetoric about race, society, and culture pursued certain reasoning to achieve social and political goals. Hence, as we survey disability history, we have to understand that a society’s ideological purpose informs notions of disability.

Darwinism (Darwinist thought) was introduced to East Asia in the early 1870s. Like their European and North American contemporaries, intellectuals in East Asia became interested in exploring the social dimensions of Darwinism – that is, they became interested in how evolution could explain social change and provide a blueprint for society to advance itself (Chung, 2014; Cross, 1996). Social Darwinism, this new area of thought, generated vigorous debates in the intellectual and political arenas. The political environment of East Asia in the late nineteenth century was ripe for Social Darwinism to feed imaginations of national (and nationalistic) agendas. Japan saw the depredations by foreign powers that had befallen the Qing dynasty as a cautionary tale of what could happen to a society that could not defend itself against global threats. Japanese intellectuals aimed to turn Japan into a “strong state” in “the survival of the fittest” (Godart, 2017) and explicitly invoked “race” as an axis to organize the rhetoric of Japan’s “racial” superiority (Chung, 2014). At the same time, intellectuals in China and Korea wanted to translate the ideological potential of Social Darwinism into action, to mobilize their respective nations’ populations and overcome their “weak” national statuses (Chung, 2014; Tikhonov, 2016).

From the start, eugenic thought (ideas about heredity, birth, and genes) in East Asia was central to discussions of Social Darwinism. Eugenicists argued that those members of society deemed to be the most “useful” (often measured in economic and military terms) had to fulfill society’s mission to thrive. Those intellectuals aimed at projecting a masculine image of strength, vitality, and courage of their nations and recognized that women played a necessary role because of their potential to bear “healthy” children and nurture them. Gender was a category that was regulated because of its social and political significance. In Japan, laws from the 1870s through the early twentieth century were revised to define abortion as a crime (Burns, 2013). From the 1920s, when eugenics gained pace, tensions developed between advocates of population control, who supported measures such as birth control, and their opponents (Kim 2008). Advocates of women’s issues, including some women, even challenged the patriarchal framing of gender (Otsubo, 2005). In Korea’s colonial period, and similarly in those years in China, birth control was debated, because although it was viewed as a means to propagate and enhance “good” racial traits, it could cause low population growth and be detrimental to a nation’s strength (David, 2018; Kim 2008).

Clearly, in these East Asian contexts of Social Darwinism and eugenics, disability was interpreted to be undesirable. Associated with “weakness,” disability was strongly discriminated against as a negative factor in a nation’s plan to cultivate an “able-bodied” population. While societies have a duty to protect their populations, including people with disabilities, the reality is that across East Asia, there was little commitment of resources to ameliorate the well-being of people with disabilities in the period leading up to World War II.

  1. 2.

    Disability, Law, and Activism

World War II had a devastating toll in East Asia in terms of the scale of destruction it caused. The war also permanently rearranged power dynamics in that region. This section looks at disability in East Asia in the post-World War II period and discusses examples of the intersection of law and activism in disability history.

The immediate postwar decades (1940s–1970s) were significant in Japan’s disability history. After Japan’s surrender to the United States, the Supreme Commander of the Allied Powers (SCAP) oversaw the administration of Japan. During the occupation, the SCAP regarded Japan’s demilitarization, democratization, and economic reconstruction as priorities. As a result of the war, there were significant numbers of disabled war veterans, and poverty was a pressing social problem. New laws had to be legislated and implemented to raise the standard of living. The SCAP, in conjunction with the Japanese national government, used legislation to help people regain their livelihoods (Pennington, 2015). As Lee Pennington (2015) points out, the Livelihood Protection Law of 1946 did not create privileges for disabled war veterans. This was a political choice. The SCAP was clear about not rewarding wartime service, particularly because Japan had to be held accountable for its role in World War II.

In 1949, Japan passed the National Welfare Law for People with Physical Disabilities, the first law in Japan that was centered on disability and welfare (Pennington, 2015). Under that law, civilians with physical disabilities and disabled war veterans were regarded equally, and the main goal was to help people with physical disabilities gain access to rehabilitation and other social services (Yamada, 2013). After the occupation, as disability became a mainstream category in welfare, people with other disabilities were legally recognized. The National Law for the Welfare of People with Intellectual Disabilities of 1960 and the Basic Act for People with (Physical) Disabilities of 1970 provided the framework for legal approaches to disability (Stevens, 2013). Later, in 1993, the original Basic Act for People with (Physical) Disabilities was updated to include mental and intellectual disabilities under the same label of disability.

South Korea’s postwar disability history, like Japan’s, was influenced by democratization and disability rights activism. The Korean peninsula was divided by the USSR and US into North and South Korea at the end of World War II in 1945; the Korean War (1950–53) deepened the conflict between the two Koreas. After the Korean War, South Korea was ruled by military dictatorships until the 1980s when it started to transition to democratic rule. South Korea’s democratization, though delayed compared with Japan’s postwar transition, proceeded apace. As that happened, there were growing demands by activists for the expansion of disability welfare and laws. Activists used the 1988 Paralympics hosted by South Korea as a context to draw attention to the existing social challenges for people with disabilities (Kim 2017), and by the 1990s, their activism had led to changes in the Disability Welfare Law, the enactment of the Law to Promote Employment Among People with Disabilities, and the increased representation of people with disabilities through the Korea Federation of Organizations of People with Disabilities (Arlington, 2020). In Japan, the Green Grass Association, an activist group representing people with cerebral palsy, led disability rights movements and was joined by other groups, such as those advocating independent living for people with disabilities and those supporting deaf culture (Nakamura, 2006; Stevens, 2013). As activism gathered momentum in Japan and South Korea, activists achieved some success in lobbying their governments for antidiscrimination legislation to protect the rights of people with disabilities and facilitate their participation in society (Arlington, 2020; Heyer, 2015; Stevens, 2013).

China’s postwar experiences, like South Korea’s, were tumultuous right after World War II because of postwar conflicts. China was plunged into civil war, and in 1949, the Chinese Communists emerged victorious over their Nationalist rivals. After the civil war, the Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) Chairman Mao Zedong was instrumental as the leader who set China on a new path to accelerate economic and industrial growth. Government campaigns such as the Great Leap Forward of the late 1950s (which was part of the series of Five-Year Plans) were intended to rebuild China’s foundations and, also, reorganize Chinese society around a collective sense of nationhood – a nationhood that brought together individuals under a sovereign, national will. Amid the developments that unfolded was the collectivization of Chinese society through units called collective brigades. This collective social arrangement fostered new bonds of belonging among the Chinese population and seems to have supported people with disabilities (Fjeld & Sagli, 2011).

A new phase of disability history in China began in the 1980s. Deng Xiaoping, the leader of the CCP who succeeded Mao, recalibrated Mao’s policies to pursue state-controlled liberalization of Chinese society, particularly China’s economy, and that included “re-opening” China to the world. Disability in China drew more public attention, generally because of greater awareness of disability following the United Nations’ Year of People with Disabilities in 1981 (Kohrman, 2005). In both South Korea and Japan, the United Nations’ recognition of disability also raised awareness of disability, and the increased awareness informed the legislative context of disability (Arlington, 2020; Heyer, 2015). In 1982, advocates in China formed the Club for Youths with Disabilities (Disabled Youth Club), one of the earliest activist groups whose work cut across categories of disability (Kohrman, 2005). The China (Chinese) Federation of People with Disabilities was founded in 1988. Deng Pufang was a founding member, and his status as Deng Xiaoping’s son was very likely a reason why the federation had support from within the Chinese government (Kohrman, 2005). This disability federation is an example of the system that Matthew Kohrman calls modern Chinese “biobureaucracy,” government and non-government institutions that share bio-medical ideals of rehabilitating people with disabilities, whom they regard as people with “damaged,” “sickly” bodies (Kohrman, 2005). Using his influential status, and building on the success of the disability federation, Deng Pufang, along with others close to him, played a critical role in cementing the Law on the Protection of People with Disabilities in 1990. In recent years, China has been working toward reforming its disability welfare system so as to more equitably distribute resources across rural places, which tend to have less resources than urban areas to cope with disability, poverty, lack of healthcare, and rising insurance costs (Fjeld & Sagli, 2011).

While many of the laws in postwar East Asia in their respective ways appear to have helped to make disability acceptable, there is a long history of negative attitudes toward disability. In fact, some laws even deprived people with disabilities of their rights. One of Japan’s most restrictive laws was the National Eugenics Law of 1940. The 1940 law, which was heavily influenced by eugenic thought and laws of Nazi Germany, legalized the sterilization of people who had hereditary medical and social conditions. For example, Japanese eugenicists regarded alcoholism as a social condition with hereditary causes, and people with mental and intellectual disabilities were among those identified by the 1940 law for forced sterilization (Kato, 2009; Robertson, 2002). It is said that during the wartime period in Japan, just over 530 people with disabilities were forcibly sterilized, and until more information emerges, this figure may suggest that the scale of forced sterilization was limited because of other wartime priorities (Kawashima, 2013).

Even in the postwar period in Japan, eugenics dominated the mindsets of scientific, medical, and government officials and had a devastating impact on the social and medical treatments of disability. Japan’s Eugenics Protection Law of 1948 validated eugenic reasoning in legalizing abortion, though it cited maternal health as a reason for abortion (Kato, 2009). That 1948 law, an extension of the 1940 law, also expanded the scope of sterilization to make it legal to perform sterilization even on people who did not have hereditary conditions. For one, what was hereditary was not always scientifically proven or justified, because prenatal testing technology was limited (Kato, 2009). Both the 1940 and 1948 laws, from today’s perspective, can be seen as being harshly punitive against people with disabilities – stigmatizing disability as medical abnormality, perpetuating social misconceptions of disability, limiting the reproductive rights of people with disabilities, and reducing a woman’s role to that of giving birth to “healthy” babies. In 1952, the 1948 law was revised to make it legal for a woman to cite financial difficulty as a reason to have an abortion, making abortion also an economic choice (Kato, 2009). The law was finally abolished in 1996.

South Korea’s postwar eugenic policies have a history that can be traced back to the Korean colonial period. Eugenic thought was introduced to Korea through Japan. While Korea did not have a eugenics law in that period that paralleled the 1940 law of Japan, the Public Health Office, a branch of the colonial government, oversaw efforts to create “strong,” “fit” Koreans and even approved of sterilizing “unfit” Koreans (Kim 2017). Though Japan’s official policy was to integrate Koreans into the Japanese population, hardline Japanese factions rejected the argument that Koreans were equals (Caprio, 2009). Korean eugenicists occupied a difficult intellectual position, because they could not read against the grain to openly espouse “superior” innate qualities of the Korean ethnicity. Yet they perhaps knew that although eugenic thought was discriminatory, it was still a useful ideological, rhetorical tool to explain how Koreans could become “more progressive” as a society. After World War II, the military government of South Korea revived eugenics in discussing ways to envision the physical, economic health of the Korean nation (Kim 2017). This was one motivation for introducing the Mother and Child Health Act of 1973. Abortion was already a crime from 1953, but the law of 1973 made abortion legal in certain cases, for example, when there was reason to suspect that an unborn child’s parent had a hereditary disease – in this context, disability was the same as disease (Kim 2017). The law granted a physician the authority to recommend a patient’s sterilization to health authorities should a hereditary disability be discovered or diagnosed. There was little recourse for a patient in such a situation. In 2019, the Constitutional Court of South Korea reversed the ban on abortion and ordered that the law be revised by 2020 (Choe, 2019).

China’s history of postwar eugenic policies is part of the nation’s history of population growth control and economic planning. During World War II, as living conditions were poor and the war against Japan was claiming the lives of many Chinese, the Chinese Communists saw high birth rate as necessary to compensate for population loss (White, 2006). After World War II, the CCP’s drive to regenerate China’s population strength influenced the nation-building process in the years between 1949 and 1952. However, as the CCP was planning the first Five-Year Plan (1953–1957), it had to rethink its approach to population growth. There were real concerns that uncontrolled, rapid population growth in the nascent nation could compound the problem of scarce economic resources (White, 2006). The CCP adopted a model of “birth planning,” which was conceived as a practical plan to address birth control and as a response to reconcile competing demands for population growth and economic growth (White, 2006). Hence, “birth planning” was integral to China’s postwar vision of industrialization that could be sustained by, and not undermined by, population growth.

From 1979, the one-child policy – the government policy of having one child per family – became a necessity and a reality in China. To enforce the policy, the CCP delegated government officials to keep track of birth rates and to order sterilizations to be carried out when necessary (White, 2006). Campaigns to sterilize the population spread across the nation, especially in rural places where a large proportion of the population lived. The policy had exceptions, and what was acceptable depended on how the provincial and local governments of areas where people lived responded to the policy. Between 1983 and 1989, as agricultural reforms were changing the ownership of lands and the organization of labor among the nation’s peasantry, some places gave permission to families to have two children (White, 2006). The policy was also adjusted to apply to cases in which a family whose first child was a daughter could try to have a second child – this was a reflection of Chinese society’s gender bias for sons. Disability was a significant factor in the interpretation of the policy. A family with a child with disability (or disabilities) could be allowed to have a second child, and this discrimination against disability was reflected again in the Law on Population and Birth Planning of 2001 (Fjeld & Sagli, 2011). Most recently, China has revised its policy, encouraging families to have up to three children to reverse the projected decline as a result of the one-child policy (Wee, 2021). It remains to be seen how disability will impact the future of this new policy.

The history of Hansen’s disease (known in the earlier medical and historical literature as leprosy) can be examined in the modern context of eugenics laws in East Asia. Like mental illness, Hansen’s disease is a medical condition that has received much attention, because of a history of controversial, discriminatory treatment – a history that can be traced to premodern sources. Though Hansen’s disease is often regarded as a disease (as the name suggests), in a medical sense, it can also be a disability because of the serious physiological damage it can cause. Physical disfigurement is a visible sign of the disease (disability) and was a reason why many societies in the past shunned people with the disease (disability), as well as those suspected to suffer from it.

In 1957, China introduced the National Plan for Leprosy Control (Leung, 2009). However, the developments of “leprosy control” from that time were uneven across China, and rural populations were particularly vulnerable because of the limited scale of healthcare. Yet, no matter how the government tried to improve public health, social discrimination against Hansen’s disease was ingrained in basic aspects of life. People with Hansen’s disease were banned from getting licenses to practice in the medical profession; not only that, they were also denied the right to marriage until civil laws were changed in 2001 (Leung, 2009).

In modern Japanese and Korean societies, Hansen’s disease is still a condition that is deeply stigmatized, even though effective therapies to treat it have been around for decades (Burns, 2019; Kim 2017). In 1907, the Japanese government introduced the Leprosy Prevention Law, requiring people with that condition but without family to take care of them to be institutionalized (Arlington, 2016). The 1907 law also influenced policies toward Hansen’s disease in colonial Korea. The Japanese law was revised in 1931 as the Lifetime Confinement Law, broadening the government’s authority to institutionalize a person for life (Arlington, 2016; Burns, 2012). Under the postwar Eugenics Protection Law of 1948, people with Hansen’s disease were forcibly sterilized, though evidence suggests that sterilization had been carried out on inmates at institutions even before that law was introduced (Burns, 2019). Japan’s 1931 law was finally repealed in 1996, and that marked the start of a new chapter of activism (Burns, 2012). The legal systems of Japan and Korea have started to respond to allegations of past injustices against people with Hansen’s disease, and over the years the activist groups have found new political voices to represent their rights (Arlington, 2016; Burns, 2019).

  1. 3.

    Disability and Popular Culture

The representation of disability in modern East Asian popular culture is an important reflection of themes about disability in cultural history. Cinematic and literary genres introduce audiences to disability, and these genres are also sites where stereotypes of disability, and responses to them, are affirmed or challenged. This section looks at some representations of disability and discusses how they are related to their contexts.

Modern Japanese popular culture (film and television) features blind people in roles that “celebrate” their incredible ability and imagines them to be powerful, sometimes clairvoyant, humans who are more capable than sighted people. Miminashi Hōichi (Hōichi the Earless), a blind musician in the Japanese genre of ghost tales, is portrayed as such a “super” blind person. He uses his music to speak to the supernatural world, but because he is blind, he does not know that he is “seen” by the ghostly audience (Prince, 2018). Another famous blind character is Zatōichi, a masterful swordsman. He is depicted as a “super” savior who does not shy away from tough battles to save victims from injustice (Okuyama, 2020). From a historical perspective, many blind people in premodern Japan were musicians, and though there may be similar ideas in popular culture then and now about blind people, blind musicians’ genres and performances belong to the contexts of their times (Tan, 2019). The context of premodern (early modern) Japanese society was also favorable to the social organization of blind people (Groemer, 2001; Tan, 2019). Beginning in the Meiji period, the Japanese government focused on raising the level of student enrollment in primary education. As part of this push for education, students with visual and hearing disabilities could enroll in special schools (schools for blind and deaf students), where they were taught academic subjects and skills for vocations, such as music and artisanry, though it is evident that not every child with disabilities could afford an education (Arakawa et al., 1976; Nakamura, 2006).

Modern Japanese popular culture also tackles themes about living with disability. Ōe Kenzaburō, an iconic Japanese writer, uses his works to explore the ups and downs in his relationship with his son Hikari, who has disabilities. He writes about his emotional struggle upon learning that his son could be born with disabilities and about the anxiety of a parent in a society which strives to eliminate disability (Shek-Noble, 2019). Film and literature also examine disability related to Japan’s traumatic past. The atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki at the end of World War II resulted in countless deaths, injuries, and intense suffering. In postwar works, survivors of those bombings are portrayed as victims bearing war’s physical and psychological scars (Shibata, 2019). In Japan’s postwar reconstruction period, environmental pollution posed a serious threat to the nation’s growth and to human lives. Ishimure Michiko, a writer and environmental activist, uses literature to shed light on industrial mercury poisoning in the fishing town of Minamata. The disease, diagnosed in the 1950s and called Minamata disease, caused serious physical and neurological disabilities among the local residents (Thornber, 2012). The Fukushima nuclear meltdown of 2011 (following the earthquake-tsunami disasters) is a more recent example of environmental pollution in Japanese history. The incident triggered new fears of disability from exposure to radiation, and there is concern that those fears may deepen eugenic views of disability (Mashimo, 2018).

The modern cultural context of South Korea, like Japan’s context, tends to highlight that disability is undesirable and diminishes a person’s “value” to society. Eunjung Kim’s (2017) analysis of disability in South Korea introduces the idea of “curative violence.” It is the idea that disability has to be “cured,” but “cure” is not what it seems, because it affirms a certain norm that can disrupt the “personhood” of the person with disabilities who is subjected to that treatment (Kim 2017). In recent decades, South Korean filmmakers produced documentaries about disability and gender, challenging the uncritical idea of disability that demeans women with disabilities and limits their prospects of marriage and other assumptions that are eugenically motivated to stop women with disabilities from fully embracing their personal desires (Kim 2017). Novels and films have also highlighted physical and mental violence inflicted upon people with disabilities to “cure” them, unjustified violence that has become an expression of the systemic oppression to dehumanize people with disabilities (Kim 2017).

In modern Chinese popular culture, film opens up new avenues to explore different dimensions of disability. Early postwar films used disability for propaganda to enhance the trope of surmounting disability (seen as adversity) to become “useful” to the nation’s labor force (Dauncey, 2020). People with physical disabilities are cast in roles that glorify the virtue of persevering against disability to benefit the common good (Dauncey, 2020). This ideology of nation before self, or collective effort before individual needs, was central to the Communist government’s powerful mobilization of national spirit. From the 1980s, with the changeover of political leadership and a slow “opening” in the political climate, Chinese films looked beyond predictable, propagandistic plots with disability – though this does not mean that there was broad acceptance of politically sensitive topics. For example, Chinese filmmaker Zhang Yimou’s To Live, a 1994 film, can be seen as an allegorical story of China, told through the life of a young woman with hearing and speaking disabilities whose stoic, unbroken silence is a symbol of the nation’s unhealing wound and its unspeakable pain (Riep, 2018). This film was banned in China (Dauncey, 2007). As Steven Riep (2018) explains, later films from the 2000s about disability such as Breaking the Silence have focused on the complex parent-child relationship, exploring the choices that a parent has to make in taking care of a child with disabilities. These perspectives, though not always told through the voices of people with disabilities, make disability an everyday experience to which families can relate and humanize people with disabilities in ways that supersede previous propagandistic, nationalistic themes.

Conclusion

This chapter has surveyed disability history through the discussion of science, medicine, law, activism, and popular culture in modern East Asian societies. In each of the societies presented in this chapter, disability was linked to developments in science and medicine. Laws were influenced by those scientific and medical perspectives, and popular culture expressed popular attitudes toward disability. While this chapter uses disability history to draw out some common points about disability in modern East Asian societies, it also reveals that disability history is about diverse perspectives on disability because disability in each society and each culture is unique.