Surrounding Oshima, a tiny island in Southwest Japan, is the calm, blue Seto Inland Sea. The island itself is a place of beauty: Nearly everywhere are manicured trees and shrubs including matsu pines that look like over-sized bonsai, Japanese maples, mountain peach trees, and tsubaki, a type of camellia with deep green leaves that in winter blooms vibrant red flowers. Views of other mountainous islands further out at sea are visible from all over Oshima, especially along the winding trails that go up and down a partially forested steep hill.
But near the center of the island, inside an otherwise vacant and nondescript one-story building, is the scene of a nightmare. An art exhibit of what appears to be two life-sized doctors, covered entirely in protective white scrubs and lab coats and wearing knee-high boots, are reaching with long tongs at a tiny boy inside a dimly lit room. Just outside, in a dome-like structure that echoes even the quietest whisper, is an old table, recovered from the sea that was once used for dissecting bodies of dead patients. The works, and others on display on Oshima, tell of a decades-long chapter of this island’s history that taints, but does not overshadow, its natural magnificence.
From the early 1900s, Oshima served as one of several sanatoriums in Japan. People with what’s now called Hansen’s disease, an illnesses caused by Mycobacterium leprae, were detained there, usually until death, even after an effective medication, promin, was discovered in the 1940s. Hansen’s is contagious, but is not very easily spread among people who spend little time together, and has for decades been curable when treated early. Still, if treatment is given too late, the disease can cause deformities, blindness and nerve damage and other permanent disabilities.
But as the exhibits by artist Tashima Seizo and others on Oshima show, Hansen’s, which is commonly known as leprosy, can have an even greater effect on those who have never been infected at all: It can cause the general public and those in political power to submit to their basest fears and act out their most inhumane prejudices, shipping away fellow men, women and children and ripping them from their families forever. Thousands of people on the island who died there would have their ashes not buried near the loved ones they were pried away from years earlier, but in a grave on the island called the Charnel House.
One of the first works I stumbled upon by Tashima was a huge ball of sea garbage – paper cups, styrofoam boxes, a ball – inside a pink room. When you pull on a rope on the mass, it swings forward toward a window, and a voice calls out, “Why did you throw me away?” Another work shows a mermaid, trapped and crying.
When at its most populated, Oshima housed around 700 patients, all cramped in tiny communal housing, which is also depicted in the art exhibit. Despite what they endured in their youth when they caught Hansen’s, a few dozen residents, who had long ago undergone treatment, still choose to stay on Oshima today.
Nomura Hiroshi is one resident, who was tricked and trapped there when in middle school, decades ago after he spotted a strange black spot on his skin. He, however, has since decided to live out his life on the island, according to an interview with him in a regional promotional magazine, The Kagawa. (Oshima is part of Kagawa prefecture.) He told the magazine that he remembers when he was a young teenager, a doctor told him he would get promin to treat the disease and then he would be able to heal on the island before returning home. His mother chased after his departing bus, disheveled and crying, but he still didn’t know he would not be allowed to go home. Nomura’s story is portrayed in the works by Tashima – including Nomura’s bus ride from his faraway hometown to the port where he departed for Oshima, the doctors handling him from an impossible distance, and his pleas for why, after decades, he was locked down on the island, though he no longer carried the bacterium. His wife, whom he met on Oshima, was forced to abort their child.
“There’s a history where the Hansen’s patients were treated like criminals,” Nomurasays in a pamphlet about his works that began 10 years ago on Oshima. But signs of empathy and humanity, as well as brilliant nature, shine through on Oshima. A series of statues donated by a Buddhist monk represent the famed 88 temples of Shikoku, the main Japanese island off of which Oshima is located. Paths twist and turn through the island, and many are marked for the blind to more easily and safely travel them. A library houses donated books and even some that were written by people trapped on the island. And for the past several years, the island serves not only as a place for those remaining residents, but as a museum of the human rights abuses those forced to go there faced. Near that art exhibit showing the pain of Hansen’s patients, a garden shaped by Tashima now is underway, bringing a sense of hope to the island, and for humanity. But it’s a hope that’s only possible, under the light of truth.
Adam Smith is the author of, “A Round Turtle Between the Sea and Mountains.”
