Two nine-year-olds among the 25,000 people forcibly sterilised in Japan under its post-World War Two eugenics law, a parliament report has revealed.
The law, in place for 48 years, forced people to undergo operations to prevent them having children deemed “inferior”.
Many of them had physical or cognitive disabilities, or mental illness.
It acknowledged that about 25,000 people had subjected to operations. Thus more than 16,000 of which performed without consent.
Some people told that they were undergoing routine procedures like appendix operations, the report disclosed. Local governments at the time had the power to arbitrarily assign the surgery.
The two nine-year-olds who sterilised were a boy and a girl, the report said.
Critics of the report say it does not address why it took nearly 50 years for the law to scrapped. It nor explain the reason behind the creation of the law.
The report has caused outrage on social media.
One Twitter user said it was sickening to find out that children as young as nine sterilised.
Another criticised the government for being too slow to repeal the eugenics law, while expressing hope that Tokyo would also look at laws that limit the rights of women and LGBTQ persons.
The law is widely recognised as a dark chapter in Japan’s post-war recovery and repealed in 1996.
On Monday, parliament released a long-awaited 1,400-page study, based on a government investigation which began in June 2020.