An earthquake shakes the independent living movement in Japan

In 1995, an earthquake measuring 7.3 on the Richter scale struck just 16 kilometers from the port city of Kobe in Japan. The earthquake caused more than $80 billion in property damage, and killed more than 6,400 people. Disabled city dwellers were uniquely affected, as they risked losing benefits provided by local governments if they moved out of areas of harm. Moreover, they had difficulty finding affordable and accessible housing.

Anthropologist Karen Nakamura notes, “The Independent Living (IL) movement began in 1986 in Japan after some men and women with disabilities visited and trained in IL programs in the United States and returned.” A key part of the movement is its intention to give people with disabilities the resources to live in their communities rather than in nursing homes. Centers for Independent Living (CIL) offer “accompanied care services, independent living training and transition services, peer counseling, sheltered workshop running, etc.” to its members.

With their special needs met in Nagoya, Shimoji and his compatriot can turn their attention to helping the Mainstream Association support more people with disabilities in Kobe.

The Mainstream League, one of the CIL’s, was founded by disabled activists in 1989. Left homeless after the earthquake, Tsutomu Shimoji, who had earlier been able to leave a nursing home due to the support of the Society, was forced to leave Kobe temporarily. He and his disabled peers moved to the city of Nagoya, where an independent living center petitioned the city government to support the earthquake victims. With their special needs met in Nagoya, Shimoji and his compatriot can turn their attention to helping the Mainstream Association support more people with disabilities in Kobe.

“They raised $250,000 in two weeks, all from private donations,” Nakamura writes. “I allowed them [Mainstream Association] to purchase their own building, which is an open plan design created specifically around the needs of people with disabilities.”

The inequality and slowness of the Japanese government’s response to the Great Hanshin Earthquake, as it would later be called, led to some legislative reforms. A new law “made it easier for socially oriented non-profit organizations to integrate”. and reforms to the Support Payment Scheme in 2003 “transformed the independent living movement” by “providing the mechanism by which the CIL could finance itself”.

“The idea of ​​subsidy-funded CILs caught on like wildfire,” Nakamura explains. “Designed for people with mild to moderate needs, the Support Payment Scheme is quickly becoming a mechanism for people with severe disabilities to move out of institutions or their parents’ homes and live independently.”

However, just a year later, new legislation that would lower the amount the government would cover for personal escorts was on the table. In 2004, the National Ministry of Health, Labor and Welfare in Tokyo proposed a “major design” that would consolidate disability care into another program, resulting in a “significant reduction” of payments for accompanying care services.

“With the support of a companion, many people with moderate to severe disabilities who had been institutionalized for decades were living independently for the first time,” Nakamura wrote. Distraught by this threat to their new-found independence, the disabled and their allies staged a series of protests in front of the Ministry of Health, Labor and Welfare building in Tokyo.

“The ministry did not anticipate the degree to which the grand design would be criticized and withdrew the proposal from study,” Nakamura writes. “The protesters argued that it does not make sense for disability care to act as an insurance program.”

When Nakamura last visited the area in 2006, she found that the future of independent living centers was up in the air. But she hopes that focusing on local support for people with disabilities “might be exactly that [is] Wanted in the next chapter of the disability movement in Japan.”

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By: Karen Nakamura

Human Organization, Vol. 68, Issue 1 (Spring 2009), pp. 82-88

Applied Anthropology Society

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