Hansen’s Disease and Patient Writing in Colonial Taiwan’s Sanatorium, 1934-1944: The Affect of the Institution

Abstract

In recent years, much attention has been given to people affected by Hansen’s disease who write about their experience of the illness and quarantine policies in Japan. Scholarship has been focused on “popular” writing, by authors who became relatively well-known, such as Hōjō Tamio (1914-1937). However, the treatment of a few exceptional male writers as representative of all patient experience erases the multiplicities of diverse patient experience. One literary coterie that has received no critical attention is the work produced by writers institutionalized in the Japanese colonial hospital in Taiwan, Rakusei Sanatorium for Lepers of the Governor-General of Taiwan (Taiwan Sōtokufu Raibyō Rakusei-in, today Lesheng Sanatorium). The colonial government opened this hospital in 1930, and the hospital magazine began publication in 1934. Rakusei-in was one of three colonial hospitals established by the Japanese government and it was the only one to have a small, active group of writers producing work in the Japanese language. This paper introduces writing by people diagnosed with Hansen’s disease and living in Rakusei-in as a site of affective communities, looking at the way residents negotiated their institutionalization and colonial status in the official hospital publication. Ultimately, I demonstrate that in colonial Taiwan, writing by those suffering from Hansen’s disease served to create an affective community of Hansen’s disease patients. They participated in the reproduction of the ideologies underpinning Japan’s imperial project, while at the same time creating a space for some negotiation of their own identities on the margins of empire.