Occupational Therapy: Japanese Disabled Veterans and the Postwar Occupation of Japan

In August 1945 Emperor Hirohito of Japan called upon his subjects to “endure the unendurable and suffer what is insufferable” as a defeated, occupied, and war-torn nation. In his Imperial Rescript on Surrender, Hirohito humbly acknowledged Japan’s living war casualties by noting that “The welfare of the wounded and the war sufferers … is the object of our profound solicitude.” However, unlike “war sufferers,” namely, civilian victims of Allied bombing raids and other offensives, during the early years of the postwar Allied Occupation (1945-1952) disabled veterans fell through the cracks of social welfare initiatives designed to aid Japan’s population of war victims. Prior to defeat, state-sponsored relief for disabled veterans constituted the only national disability assistance program of the prewar period. After defeat, assistance programs for disabled veterans fell by the wayside once the Supreme Commander of the Allied Powers (SCAP)—the U.S. military agency that governed Japan during the Occupation—dissolved wartime social services for disabled veterans. In the view of SCAP, granting assistance to disabled veterans might perpetuate the social militarization that the Americans sought to excise from Japanese society. In August 1947 the Japanese Welfare Ministry proposed new social programs for people with physical disabilities but SCAP rejected these early plans on the grounds that they provided preferential assistance to disabled veterans. During the next two years, SCAP and the Welfare Ministry negotiated the creation of assistance programs that conformed to national demilitarization policies and confirmed the Japanese government’s responsibility to provide assistance to all people with physical disabilities in need. In this paper I examine the occupation-era creation of postwar public assistance programs for not only Japan’s disabled veterans but also its wider community of people with physical disabilities.