Okayama: Experience Life as a Leprosy Patient Quarantined in Japan’s Seto Inland Sea at Newly Opened Facility

By Atsuko Nakata / Yomiuri Shimbun Staff Writer

11:07 JST, December 27, 2025

SETOUCHI, Okayama — An experience-based facility recently opened that allows visitors to experience how it felt to be a leprosy patient isolated in Japan’s first national leprosy sanatorium on an island in the Seto Inland Sea, in accordance with national law at the time.

Densho Aisei-kan is designed to preserve the memories of residents at the National Sanatorium Nagashima Aisei-en, who have now become too old to share their experiences. The new facility will play a role in passing down the history of this infringement of human rights and ensure such mistakes are never repeated.

“It was a long time before I could think it was beautiful,” said Shinji Nakao, 91, who heads the residents’ association, looking at a large photo panel put up at the entrance of the new facility.

It is a photo of the Seto Inland Sea seen from the sanatorium.

“It looks beautiful at first glance, but we want visitors to understand that this sea was also a huge ‘wall’ preventing the residents from returning to their hometowns,” Tomohisa Tamura, curator at the Nagashima Aisei-en historical museum, said.

The historical museum, built in 2003, is housed within the sanatorium and introduces the history of leprosy through preserved video materials and panel displays. Densho Aisei-kan adopts a new theme: Allowing visitors to vicariously experience the lives of the residents.

The impetus for constructing Densho Aisei-kan was the aging of the residents. With the average age of the 67 current residents exceeding 89, opportunities to hear their history directly will soon be lost.

Over the last 25 years, the sanatorium has run a program in which the residents share their experiences, but Nakao is the only storyteller now. As it has become difficult to continue the program, sanatorium staff have been looking for an alternative to residents’ testimonies.

At the request of Nakao and others, the museum’s curators spent several years inspecting similar historical museums outside the prefecture and decided to renovate an unused ward at the sanatorium to create an experiential facility.

Passing the large photo panel, visitors enter the “Room of beginnings,” which re-creates part of the confinement area where patients were first taken and disinfected upon arriving on the island.

In this room, a curator dressed as a nurse asks visitors to come up with their “registration name,” which they would be called within the facility. Visitors write down their registration name on a name tag bearing an admission number — a procedure designed to invoke the feelings of the residents: Some had to use pseudonyms out of fear of discrimination, while others wrote down their real name to stand on their dignity.

The “VR theater: A family’s story” is one of the facility’s highlights. Animated footage is projected onto large screens in three separate rooms, allowing visitors to experience the perspectives of three distinct parties: a boy with leprosy, his family and people around the family. While no headgear is used for this theater, visitors can witness this part of history from a first-person perspective.

The footage depicts a boy, living with his parents and younger sister, who faces discrimination after being diagnosed with leprosy and quarantined in the sanatorium.

The facility features other exhibition spaces that collect video testimonies from residents or trace the history of infectious diseases throughout human history.

The history of leprosy involves families being forced to send their beloved children to a sanatoriadue to the severe discrimination they faced, and a society that shunned patients and their families out of fear of infection.

“Discrimination has repeated itself even during the COVID-19 pandemic,” Tamura said. “We want visitors to learn in a three-dimensional way about the social structures that give rise to prejudice and discrimination beyond leprosy.”

Nagashima Aisei-en

The national sanatorium to isolate leprosy patients opened in 1930 on Nagashima Island in the Seto Inland Sea, now in Setouchi, Okayama Prefecture. In the 1940s, 2,000 people were admitted. It is thought about 7,000 people were admitted over time. November marked the facility’s 95th anniversary.

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