Twenty-five former Hansen's disease patients from Taiwan filed a lawsuit Friday at the Tokyo District Court, demanding that the government repeal its rejection of their demand for compensation over Japan's past segregation policy.
In October, the Health, Labor and Welfare Ministry rejected the plaintiffs' compensation application filed in August, citing a law providing for compensation for people segregated under the policy. The patients were institutionalized in a sanitarium in Taiwan when the island was under Japanese colonial rule between 1895 and 1945.
The ministry maintains that while the nationality and current place of residence of the former patients do not matter when applying for compensation, the law does not cover people kept in sanitariums in Japan's former colonies.
The law took effect in 2001 to provide former Hansen's patients who were isolated at sanitariums in Japan with between 8 million yen and 14 million yen each in compensation.
The amount is determined by how long they were segregated under the Leprosy Prevention Law, which was repealed in 1996.
Former patients in South Korea brought a similar lawsuit to the court in August after the ministry rejected their application for compensation.
Most of the plaintiffs in Friday's lawsuit, aged between 72 and 84, still live in a Taipei sanitarium established in 1930 by the then office of Japan's governor general in Taiwan, which was in place during Japan's colonial rule.
"We were detained as Japanese citizens and forced to live our life as if we were in a prison," plaintiff Chen Shi-shi, 81, said.
People institutionalized at the sanitarium were sterilized, forced to have abortions and made to work, according to the suit.