Seven Years Pass Since the ‘Sagamihara Massacre’ when 19 People with Disabilities at a Care Home in Japan were Killed

By Barrier Free Japan

July 25 2023

KANAGAWA, JAPAN – July 26th 2023 will mark seven years since the ‘Sagamihara Massacre’, when, in the small hours of July 26, 2016, Satoshi Uematsu, a former worker at a care facility for people with disabilities in Sagamihara City in Kanagawa Prefecture, broke into his former place of employment and killed 19 residents aged between 19 and 70 with a knife and injured 26 others, specifically 24 residents and two employees.

Satoshi Uematsu’s death sentence was finalized in March 2020.

We can ask whether attitudes towards people with disabilities in Japan have improved since the stabbings, but it is a difficult question to answer. On the one hand it is a good thing that the Japan see government published a detailed report on the Eugenics Protection Law, a law that required from 1948 until 1996 that people with disabilities in Japan be forcibly sterilized to prevent the production of “inferior offspring”. I also think it may say something about attitudes that so many of the victims of the law often want anonymity. When Junko Iizuka (a pseudonym) spoke on the Eugenic Protection Law at the Foreign Correspondents Club of Japan, she appeared with a hat and mask to hide her face.

Since 2016 there have been reports of abuse at care homes for people with disabilities as well as a report produced by the Japanese government stating that people with disabilities were forcibly sterilized. Recently, it was reported by The Tokyo Shimbun that mentally disabled people at a care home in Fuchu City, Tokyo had allegedly been abused by a former Vice President of the corporation that ran the care home. What makes the allegation worse is that people that attempted whistleblowers were ignored for seven years, the length of time that has passed since the Sagamihara Massacre.