In the 1990s, there remained a reservoir of old patients. Inexorably, that has become true as patients have grown old and seen their options slowly closed. Some have accepted this fate as penance, a judgment for the burden their disease brought on their families. Such was the embracing shame of leprosy that even their banishment did not save their families from condemnation. Shimura still tenses in pain at the memory of how his younger sister's dreams of marriage were shattered when her fiance's doctor decreed his family contaminated, even 10 years after he had entered the sanitarium.
Japan is based on a culture of shame.
Even at 12, Takashi understood that severe judgment. His family ran a fish shop. When his disease was diagnosed, they put him in a hut behind the house and kept him isolated there for two years, bringing him food and books, and allowing him to play on the beach only when no others were there. It was right after the war, and Takashi was examined at a U.S. military hospital. But my family couldn't do that for financial reasons.