Writing Ties in Japan: Family, Familialism, and Children’s Writing in an Early Twentieth-century Hansen’s Disease Hospital.

At the turn of the twentieth century, a series of government policies established public hospitals and regulated the quarantine of patients diagnosed with Hansen’s disease (leprosy). Soon after the first public facilities began receiving patients in 1909, residents of the facilities formed literary coteries and began to write a genre that became popularly referred to as ‘leprosy literature’ up until the 1940s. The genre includes poetry, essays, diaries, short fiction, literary criticism, and children’s work. Focusing on output from the Nagashima Aisei-en hospital, this article offers readings of a sample of children’s work written in the context of thetsuzurikataeducational movement, examining writings by both healthy children with institutionalized parents and children diagnosed with Hansen’s disease. It explores the disruption to the biological family and the ways in which an ideology of familialism at Aisei-en created the institutional family. It then highlights the approaches taken by children to negotiate this ideology so as to create ties to both their biological and institutional families. Tracing the categories of the infected and not-yet-infected child, the article underscores the ways in which children understood their isolation experience and the concept of family within the hospital. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]