Kōmei School: origins and challenges

The Taishō era’s enthusiasm for school reform drew attention toward special needs education (Monbushō n.d. b). National legislation in 1923 commanded the establishment of schools for those with hearing and seeing disabilities in each prefecture. In 1931 the Tokyo City Education Bureau found 1,200 school-age children with physical disabilities, one-third of whom had been rejected with deferments or exemptions from compulsory school without ever attending (Ishikawa Reference Ishikawa1982). Tokyo City School Superintendent Fujii Toshitaka was experienced with Taishō period normal [teacher-training] schools, the New Education Movement, and child-centered schooling. Fujii was deeply impressed by US schooling for children with disabilities during a 1929 tour and urged the Tokyo assembly to approve a specialized school (Matsumoto Y. Reference Matsumoto and Kumiai1982). Growing numbers of pediatric patients sparked an appeal from within Tokyo Imperial University’s orthopedic surgery department for a facility that could provide both treatment and education (Hanada Reference Hanada1997).

However, by 1932, fiscal stress combined with rising militarism to gainsay the liberal Taishō era school movement. The spending for a school of children with mobility impairment faced opposition. Many city politicians considered children with disabilities unworthy of investment. Progressive challengers needed ideological compromises to engineer city council approval against a countercurrent of criticism. The first city council vote rejected the proposal (Hanada Reference Hanada1997). The prevailing view was that, if such funding were available in a depression, it would better be spent on “ordinary” children (Hanada Reference Hanada1997). Nevertheless, key supporters gained election to the city assembly and lent support (Ishikawa Reference Ishikawa1982; Hanada Reference Hanada1997), providing the margin for approval of a physical needs facility. Tokyo’s mayor backed the school, which he named Kōmei (Matsumoto Y. Reference Matsumoto and Kumiai1982), the first public institution for compulsory-school-aged children with mobility impairments in Japan and East Asia (Hanada Reference Hanada1997). The school’s first campus is seen in Figure 1.

The school’s founders were compelled to formulate a bifold objective, balancing their humanitarian mission to provide individuals with mobility restrictions with the chance to go to school with an ideologically approved goal of preparing pupils as national human resources (Ishida Reference Ishida1946: 320). The Taishō period’s teacher-initiated progressive turn in schooling had a minimal effect on education bureaucrats, however. Kōmei gained accreditation as a “miscellaneous school” but not a (compulsory) primary school, bespeaking limits to its political support. Primary enrollment was mandated and almost universal in Japan. Nevertheless, students with disabilities were still not required to go to school nor was education promised to them. Instead, they were often blocked from compulsory primary enrollment, and the government still refused to guarantee the provision of facilities, personnel, materials, and equipment to teach them.

Having survived a contentious political test, Kōmei School opened and admitted children with illnesses such as cerebral palsy, muscular dystrophy, polio, and tuberculosis of the spine (Matsumoto S. Reference Matsumoto and Kyōkai2005) who were blocked from public compulsory education by government-issued exemptions. Kōmei School uniquely provided academic, vocational, and health services to 34 children who would otherwise have been unable to go to school.

City officials and Kōmei staff remained wary of prevailing prejudice against children with mobility challenges. A news article revealed contemporary bigotry that equated physical and intellectual difficulties, explaining that Kōmei entrants “… are called crippled [fugu physically disabled] (but)…completely different from those with low IQ [teinō]; they simply have a motor function disorder…” (Yomiuri Shinbun 1932). The Education Ministry’s advisory Education Council proposed more special (but not compulsory) schools for children with physical and mental disabilities and considered compulsory education for pupils with seeing and hearing disabilities. The Ministry abandoned the ideas owing to fiscal issues that also faced Kōmei School. Another report asserted that 10% of the students were of genius level and several were accomplished in art or music (Asahi Shinbun 1935a), aiming to tamp down widespread popular conflation of children with intellectual and physical challenges. The school’s first principal, Yūki Sutejirō (1932–1939), sought an anachronistically humanistic child-centered approach during wartime (Shimizu Reference Shimizu2018).Footnote ²

Kōmei School admitted pupils already familiar with rejection from the existing public school regime (Asahi Shinbun 1935b). Hanada Shunchō (1925–2017), a prolific author and activist with severe cerebral palsy, testifies to the unwelcome exclusion from compulsory school that many children with disabilities faced. As he reached the entering schooling age of 6 years, school staff issued an unwelcome exemption denying him entry to compulsory primary school, jinjō shōgakkō (NHK 2014). Kōmei School then provided an opportunity, and Hanada enrolled at the age of 9 years. His recollection attests to the institute’s significance in the lives of children with disabilities in the 1930s: “I was isolated, so when Kōmei School opened, I thought I was saved. I was overjoyed. The joy of being released from an isolated world. Kōmei was truly a beacon of light [Kōmei is written with Chinese characters meaning light]” (NHK 2014). At Kōmei, previously denied and disappointed children were able to study and play as normally as possible (Ishida Reference Ishida1946). It provided lodging, academic and vocational instruction, nursing, and physical therapy (Minato-ku n.d.).

Kōmei faculty offered children with disabilities new experiences. One rare innovation at the time was sewing for both girls and boys as a therapeutic exercise and a vocational skill (Kōmei Gakkō 1935). Pupils took part in a summer “forest school” to a hot spring in 1937, a popular excursion for health and learning (Asahi Shinbun 1937a).Footnote ³ The inaugural principal, Yūki, also instituted an original lifestyle education program in 1937 to cultivate social awareness in often isolated students with disabilities (Asahi Shinbun, 1937b). This research finds that Yuki’s class presaged by decades a similarly targeted ‘seikatsu (life, lifestyle)’ life studies course integrated into the curriculum for grades 1–2 from 1989 (MEXT 2015). The campus moved to Setagaya Ward, then relatively rural, in 1939, as seen in Figure 2. Wartime self-sufficiency joined pedagogy in May of 1943 as the small plot of seedlings expanded to a 5,000 m² field cultivated for foodstuffs and a livestock barn was built. Pupils with mobility difficulties planted and harvested crops, maintained fields, and cared for the animals as part of their education and exercise. Kōmei School pioneered education for children with mobility challenges who had been abandoned by the jinjō shōgakkō compulsory school system, and in cases surpassed the standard public curriculum.

Kōmei School and its pupils in wartime

During the 1930s, education nationwide was driven by the wartime imperatives of total war, modernization, rationalization, and standardization. Kōmei’s expensive child-centered individual instruction clashed with national ideology defining children as strategic resources of the state. The school opened in 1932 during a worldwide depression as invading Japanese forces were turning Manchuria into a colony. The third principal (1942–1958), Matsumoto Yasuhira, complained, “…the dark shadow of this militaristic nation had been stalking and creeping around Kōmei School even before the school opened” (Matsumoto Y. Reference Matsumoto and Kumiai1982: 166). Former students have testified to experiencing oppression and derision during the long era of conflict (NHK n.d.).

A recurring cavil pursued the school—critics denying the value of children with disabilities: “Tokyo’s finances are insufficient to pay for crippled (fugu, sic., physically disabled) children. If we have that kind of money, we should focus on educating gifted children. That would be much better for the country” (Matsumoto Y. Reference Matsumoto and Kumiai1982: 166). Minor infractions amplified official censure. Municipal inspectors said the institute was “…a useless school that eats nothing but money” (Matsumoto Y. Reference Matsumoto and Kumiai1982: 168), and pupils were frequently called a nuisance (Matsumoto Y. Reference Matsumoto and Kumiai1982: 167–168). Children with disabilities were assumed to be cognitively substandard, accused of consuming excessive resources, and denigrated as unhelpful in civic duties.Footnote ⁴

Kōmei School’s leaders defended the institution and attempted to carve out a place in Japan for their pupils and other vulnerable people with disabilities. Principal Yūki argued against the prevailing view that children with disabilities were useless. While affecting official prowar dogma (Shimizu Reference Shimizu2018: 140), Yūki stayed on his original message to the press: People with disabilities have abilities and can be contributors (Yomiuri Shinbun 1932), (Asahi Shinbun 1935a). Yūki offered a formula to fit disparaged people with disabilities into the category of Japanese citizens and humans: “The goal of the sacred war was building a new East Asia and world-wide propagation of the imperial way…” in which “the ‘productive capability’ of disabled people…should be proposed to the world” (Yūki Reference Yūki and Shimizu1939). However, children with mobility impairments were denigrated by Japanese society in wartime, excluded from the category of “little citizens” or “the “junior nation” (shōkokumin), who were the vanguard of “abled” children upon which the nation’s future depended.Footnote ⁵

Students with disabilities and conscription

The war mobilization system and its demands, modernization, rationalization, and standardization dominated education (Saito and Imai Reference Saito and Imai2004). Kōmei School and its pupils endured increasing wartime animosity against disabilities. Male military conscription and labor service for both girls and boysFootnote ⁶ drew unfriendly attention toward children with disabilities. Incessant state propaganda emphasized national unity and positioned pupils with mobility challenges as outsiders, calling them “…idling freeloaders and nuisances” (Shimizu Reference Shimizu2018: 145), castigated as “un-Japanese” (hikokumin) (Akiyama Reference Akiyama2006), “useless rice-consuming vermin,” and “a waste of food” (Matsuda Reference Matsudan.d.; ZKSS 2004.)

The government mobilized youths with visual disabilities as military or hospital masseurs, and students with hearing disabilities were drafted to work on military construction projects or clothing factories. That is, children with audio and visual disabilities were considered useful contributors to the war effort, in contrast to children with mobility challenges, who were waived from labor service and belittled as worthless. Children disparaged because of their disabilities feared their futures in such society, and some, overwhelmed by propaganda, longed for ways to contribute (NHK 2014; Kamoshita Reference Kamoshita and Matsumoto1945). An underclass representative’s address to graduating Kōmei pupils called for them to leave the institution as “Kōmei School’s kamikaze squad” (Kamoshita Reference Kamoshita and Matsumoto1945: 207). Of course, there was no chance that these pupils would face military service. The young speaker was emotionally overcome with enthusiasm to offer his life in response to indoctrination permeating the culture, textbooks, and media. Propaganda recruited Kōmei School to be “junior citizens,” but the state rejected them from such status owing to their physical limitations.

The national campaign to ready children for service threatened the bodies as well as minds of children with disabilities. Approaching adulthood, individuals with disabilities were humiliated, cursed as faking draft dodgers, scorned as unpatriotic (Reference MatsudaMatsuda n.d.; Hayashi Reference Hayashi2022: 113–114), and beaten, and some subjected to mutilationFootnote ⁷ (Fujii Reference Fujii2022: 33–4) regardless of gender. Abled schoolchildren also suffered physical abuse at school even though corporal punishment had been banned since 1879. Girls with mobility problems did not face abusive military conscription, but they were not spared their teachers’ beatings at school (Shinbun Akahata 2007). There is no record of violence at Kōmei. Other people with disabilities or their caregivers were refused assistance and threatened by menacing officials (Yahoo News 2015).Footnote ⁸ State agents tasked with defending the state and its citizenry denied children with disabilities the dignity of a human life.

The 1941 National School Ordinance put Japan’s primary pupils on a wartime posture as schools became propaganda training camps. Kōmei was established under the “miscellaneous” school accreditation and nominally became the Tokyo Municipal Kōmei National School in April 1941 (Monbushō n.d. b). However, the ordinance retained disability the sole basis for exemption from mandatory school; in other words, disability remained a criterion to deny a child from a seat in compulsory school (Hatano Reference Hatano2008: 49). Kōmei thus remained the only fully accessible public school for children with physical challenges.

Evacuation to safety for some

The 1944–1945 mass evacuation of urban schoolchildren halted special education initiatives, and the special classes to assist pupils with mildly challenges who had managed to enter compulsory school dissolved (Monbushō n.d. c.). Wartime discrimination worsened against people with disabilities and others considered physically or mentally inferior (Arakawa Reference Arakawa2017: 13).

The national cabinet authorized the evacuation of school-aged children from urban areas in June 1944 in anticipation of enemy air raids. In all, 400,000 children participated, but the program ignored children with physical disabilities, including those from KōmeiFootnote ⁹ (Henmi Reference Henmi1998; Johnson Reference Johnson2009). The temporary migration of urban primary school children encompassed over 30% of compulsory school-aged pupils from designated areas.Footnote ¹⁰ Children deemed “not suitable” for the program included those with asthma, children with a history of bed wetting, “sickly” children, children with mobility challenges, and those who needed assistance (Teito 1994: 234–239). This would exclude Kōmei’s pupils.

Furthermore, Tokyo’s prefectural and ward authorities refused to help, in contrast to their support for other primary schools (Matsumoto Y. Reference Matsumoto and Kumiai1982: 179–180). Most Tokyo schools for children with hearing and visual challenges were also evacuated (Shimizu Reference Shimizu2018). The Tokyo Education Bureau indicated that, owing to “…the special characteristics of [its] pupils,” Kōmei was denied approval for evacuation from Tokyo and instead was instructed to stay “…in the equivalent to an evacuation campus…” at the main Setagaya school (Tokyo-To 1996: 82). A Tokyo education official denied Matsumoto’s appeal for funding to evacuate, adding, “If you don’t listen obediently to the city hall on a daily basis, this is what you get” (Matsumoto Y. Reference Matsumoto and Kumiai1982: 179). Denied assistance, an exasperated Principal Matsumoto asked, “Are physically handicapped pupils a nuisance? A burden?” (Matsumoto Y. Reference Matsumoto and Kumiai1982: 179).

Confined to the Setagaya campus, Kōmei children took refuge in air raid shelters in the schoolyard as bombing attacks continued. Prejudice ran high against children with disabilities who were not eligible for future military or labor service. The common attitude toward those caring for children with disabilities was disgust at spending funds on them (Arai Reference Arai2016). As pupils and teachers encamped at the school (June 1944 until May 1945), visiting teachers confronted Matsumoto, accusing him of frivolously playing with the children with disabilities during a war. They demanded the campus be closed and given to the government (Matsumoto Y. Reference Matsumoto1990: 193). At that point, thousands of Tokyo’s teachers were already stationed in safer rural areas on national orders with schoolchildren in their care, but Kōmei’s faculty and children were confined in Tokyo in the line of fire, repeatedly taking shelter.

After witnessing the March 9–10, 1945, firebombing conflagration to the east, Matsumoto himself sought a safer place to move his pupils. As he did, a teacher at another school said to him, “What’s the point of educating children who are useless to the country? They’re un-Japanese (hikokumin)” (Mainichi Shinbun 2010: 14). Japanese individuals with disabilities were frequent targets of the wartime disparagement, for example, hikokumin, meaning “noncitizen,” “unpatriotic,” or “un-Japanese.” Matsumoto at last found a refuge for Kōmei pupils at Kamiyamada Hotel in Nagano Prefecture [See Figure 3], arriving on May 15, 1945 just 10 days later, Kōmei School’s Setagaya Ward campus was largely destroyed, and the Azabu branch campus was demolished during air raids (Ishikawa Reference Ishikawa1982).

Extended evacuation: 1945–1949

The war ended in the third month of Kōmei School’s evacuation, but their Tokyo school being in ruins impelled them to remain in Nagano. US occupation forces assumed control, but little changed for Kōmei. Transportation, education, and other authorities convened at the Kamiyamada Hotel in October 1945, planning the recall of 200,000 Tokyo children stranded in 14 prefectures back to the metropolis (Ishikawa Reference Ishikawa1982). Ironically, the conference did nothing to facilitate Kōmei pupils’ return to their bomb-damaged school, although they were also lodged at the hotel. They were first denied any government assistance to evacuate to safety and then excluded from the policy to return evacuee schoolchildren to Tokyo.

The first evacuated schools returned to Tokyo on October 10, 1946, and most came back by late November. The official evacuation concluded March 31, 1946, but much of Tokyo was still rubble and ashes. With no means to repair Kōmei’s bombed school facilities and dormitory, Tokyo’s Education Bureau instructed them that pupils should stay put in rural Nagano.

Schooling and physical therapy were unavailable elsewhere, so pupils with disabilities joined the school at the Nagano hotel location anew. Kōmei students remained excluded from the compulsory system, but the institute opened a 3-year middle school at the Kamiyamada lodge in April 1947 as Japanese compulsory school expanded to encompass 6 years of primary and 3 years of junior high. Matsumoto, prevented from government assistance to return or rebuild, considered a permanent place in Nagano for children with disabilities to learn and work in the future (Henmi Reference Henmi2003).

The evacuation program had nationalized healthy children’s bodies, deploying them to areas of safety as incipient human resources. Ironically, some “abled” elementary pupils were stationed in public sanitariums originally built for treating ailments, but Kōmei’s children with disabilities were detained behind in the city. Pupils were castigated as “unpatriotic,” “non-Japanese” “wastes of rice.” Pupils of Kōmei School who had physical challenges were denied assistance to evacuate from Tokyo although the campus faced air attacks in Setagaya.

The state valued healthy schoolchildren as a strategic resource in wartime and sent them to safety at their “battle stations” as human resources (Henmi Reference Henmi1998) when enemy bombers approached. The faculty itself finally managed to move Kōmei School students 3 months before the war’s end. Education authorities slighted Kōmei’s pupils with disabilities in both evacuation and return (Henmi Reference Henmi1998). Government policy in wartime favored and rewarded people considered useful to the state and neglected or excluded those who were deemed useless to the war effort, and that trend continued in peacetime (Fujii Reference Fujii2022).Footnote ¹¹

As the war ended, Kōmei School remained encamped in rural Nagano Prefecture on government instructions and at a loss for funds to rebuild. Schooling continued there until May 1949 within the Ministry of Education-initiated group camps for war orphans (Ishikawa Reference Ishikawa1982). Some returnees or new enrollees were schooled in rough conditions in the bomb-damaged Tokyo campus. Government funding arrived in August 1948 after staff and parents’ association entreaties (Matsumoto S. Reference Matsumoto1993). A new Tokyo campus dormitory was completed in April 1949, and children remaining in Kamiyamada Hotel returned to Tokyo on May 28, 1949. Four classes had graduated from the school in exile when classes restarted in Setagaya on June 1, 1949 [See Figure 4] (Ishikawa Reference Ishikawa1982).

Wartime antipathy toward people with disabilities had necessitated Principal Matsumoto’s struggle to protect his pupils in the late stages of the conflict. The negative wartime stance toward children with disabilities lingered in peacetime; the children with physical disabilities were excluded from the ranks of compulsory students destined to contribute to Japan’s economic recovery as well.

The 1947 Fundamental Law on Education established equal opportunity as a tenet of education in Japan.Footnote ¹² Furthermore, it made special schools for hearing and visual schools compulsory. Tellingly, youths with those conditions had been mustered to wartime national service at the age of 14 years. The state considered them useful. The pupils at schools for those with mobility issues, in contrast, were denigrated as useless in war and then overlooked in peace.

The School Education Act authorized separated schooling in Japan on the basis of disability status (Stevens Reference Stevens2013). From 1947, compulsory education became 6 years of primary and 3 years of junior high school for most children, including those at schools for those with visual and hearing disabilities. As aforementioned, Kōmei School inaugurated a junior high school on its own in that year that admitted eight students. The Act’s Ch.2 Art. 18 reads:

In this way, it remained legal for school authorities to exempt the children with disabilities from schooling that was otherwise compulsory (Koyama Reference Koyama2011).

Fiscal issues were blamed as the obstacle to expanding the statutory mandate. Implementation of the 1956 Special Measures Law for the Development of Public Schools for the Handicapped, which was to increase special needs schooling, was supposedly hampered by insufficient funding (Murata Reference Murata2010). The Education Ministry tautologically explains: “…because the establishment of schools for the disabled was not mandated [by the national government], the way to financial support from the [national] government remained closed, and no prefectures were willing to establish new schools for the disabled fully at their own expense” (Monbushō n.d. e). However, unprecedented economic growth points to priorities, not shortfalls. Per capita gross domestic product (GDP) grew annually at an average 7.1% from 1945, when the war ended, to 1956, the year the Special Measures Law for Handicapped Schools was passed (Okazaki Reference Okazaki2015), and frequently achieved over 10% GDP/gross national product (GNP) growth annually (Yoshioka and Kawasaki Reference Yoshioka and Kawasaki2016). Kōmei primary and junior high schools became Tokyo Metropolitan Kōmei Special Needs School (yōgo gakkō) in 1957 and started admitting school students from 1958, but the primary and middle school remained outside the national compulsory system. Furthermore, the Education Ministry insisted that allowing children with visual, hearing, physical, or mental disabilities into an abled class would mean “…the education of the majority of children and students in the class who are not mentally or physically abnormal (sic disabled) cannot help but be severely hindered” (Monbushō 1961). Schooling stayed noncompulsory for children with physical and intellectual challenges, as the provision of legal exemptions continued.

Nevertheless, education for children with physical and cognitive disabilities approached a transformative event—compulsory status. At that point, General Tatsumi Eiichi, a central figure whose wartime policy separated the abled from those with disabilities, unwittingly offered a clue as to its delay. As Tokyo Air Defense Chief Tatsumi initiated the national school evacuation plan by plotting surreptitiously in direct contradiction to his commander Prime and Army Minister Tōjō Hideki’s vehement opposition. Tatsumi was dubbed “The man who saved 400,000 Japanese, The forgotten great benefactor of the mass evacuation of schoolchildren” (Hosaka Reference Hosaka1993: 50). In 1972, he described the policy he launched in 1944, exposing a decidedly utilitarian evaluation of children’s lives. His central role in wartime policy toward children and his comments as postwar educators inched toward expanded compulsory school merits an extensive quote:

Figure 1.

Kōmei School’s original Azabu, Tokyo, campus in an unused former primary school when it opened in 1932.

Figure 2.

Kōmei School’s Setagaya Tokyo campus constructed in 1939.

Figure 3.

Kamiyamada Hotel (Chikuma City, Nagano Prefecture), a refuge for Kōmei’s pupils from May 1945 to May 1949.

Figure 4.

One of four annual Kōmei graduation ceremonies that were held while evacuated to Kamiyamada Hotel.

Others among the policy and academic communities later concurred (Ikezumi Reference Ikezumi1987; Fukuya Reference Fukaya1987). The evacuation program was implemented with health criteria that excluded children in the conditions of Kōmei’s pupils. The children that the evacuation measure saved were considered precious hands and minds and lauded as contributors to national regeneration, but the wartime leaders continued to ignore those with disabilities.

“The junior nation” (shōkokumin) was re-envisioned in the new postwar 9-year compulsory system as a strategic resource for Japan’s future. The school system that made pupils into wartime strategic resources was retooled for postwar economic growth to create a new product from schoolchildren, economic human capital (Saito and Imai Reference Saito and Imai2004; Kamata Reference Kamata1984). The high-economic-growth system demanded an ableism hierarchy. Vocational education and training was provided only to those who were able to contribute to the growth regime (Takahashi S. Reference Takahashi, Yoshizō, Toshihiko, Takeshi and Kōichirō2001: 161–163). In the post-occupation era, a democratic move to eliminate discrimination and inequality in education was countered by the ableism hierarchy demanded by the high-economic-growth system (Takahashi S. Reference Takahashi, Yoshizō, Toshihiko, Takeshi and Kōichirō2001: 161–163). This policy was propelled by Japan’s rapidly growing economy and subsided with ebbing growth in the 1970s (Saito and Imai Reference Saito and Imai2004).

Education enhanced human capital; compulsory school (for children deemed “able”) lengthened, and increased numbers and percentages of youths continued through secondary education, providing a significant impetus in the expansion of Japan’s postwar economy until its wane in the early 1970s (Miyazawa Reference Miyazawa2017). But the expansion of compulsory schooling to children with physical disabilities was ignored until the rapid growth subsided. The government included children with physical and cognitive disabilities under the compulsory schooling system in 1979, eliminating the persistent deferral/exemption policy. This new provision, as the Central Council for Education confesses, was enacted to continue a doctrine of separation, teaching abled children and children with disabilities disparately in contrast to the international move toward integration (Chūō kyōiku shingikai 2010), supported by scholars and advocates in Japan as “normalization.”

Before special needs schools became compulsory, many children with disabilities experienced rejection by traditional or special schools (Watanabe, Suzuki and Takahashi Reference Watanabe, Suzuki and Takahashi2017: 4). The government admitted that, “Before special schools were made compulsory, there were a lot of children with disabilities who were rejected…” (Ministry of Education 1989). Political struggles over whether to require the attendance of pupils with disabilities at “traditional” (abled pupil) schools, termed “inclusivity,” or at separate “special” schools (for pupils with disabilities) complicated the establishment of a compulsory mandate. The government codified its preference in 1979, requiring the attendance of children with disabilities at new special needs schools instead of restaffing and refitting primary schools attended by abled children. Many concerned parents and teachers championed this decision, and the Education Ministry justified it as economical (Bookman Reference Bookman2021). Teachers and scholars identify the 1979 amendments to the School Education Law as acknowledging that children with physical and cognitive challenges have a right to schooling, by making special schools compulsory (Watanabe, Suzuki, and Takahashi Reference Watanabe, Suzuki and Takahashi2017: 4; Anderson Reference Anderson, Ignas and Corsini1981; Nakamura N. Reference Nakamura2019).

Kōmei School’s past and schooling for individuals with mobility challenges today

The history of Kōmei School and the experience of its pupils reveals evidence of a tacit but persistent division of schoolchildren in national schooling policy based on expected utility to the state. As public schools were tasked with strengthening a national identity during war, the government withheld the compulsory schooling designation from children with physical disabilities, considering them useless. Abled postwar children were reimagined as upcoming human resources for the surging economy, but expansion of compulsory school for children with disabilities was overlooked until growth waned.

The history of Kōmei School and the experiences of its pupils expose official perspectives on Japanese childhood and disability, revealing consistent discrimination against children with physical disabilities and a rigid disinclination to expand compulsory schooling to pupils with mobility challenges. Kōmei was established by progressives in the fields of education, medicine, and local politics who recognized the need for a school for children with mobility difficulties. However, staff and pupils faced relentless prejudice and opposition as official priorities turned from humanitarian to military concerns. Children with special needs were neglected in the wartime school evacuation, excluded from “the junior nation” (shōkokumin) of abled schoolchildren upon which the nation’s future was thought to rest. The human dignity of children with disabilities was denied (Hirata Reference Hirata, Mikio and Satoshi2010: 29). The Kokumin Gakkō National Schools system made schools training grounds for future military resources, which relegated many pupils with physical disabilities to the status of un-Japanese (hikokumin), and their conscientious caretakers were belittled as unhelpful shirkers (Akiyama Reference Akiyama2007; Reference Akiyama2006; Matsumoto Y. Reference Matsumoto1990; Reference Matsumoto and Kumiai1982). However, staff and graduates such as Hanada Shunchō persevered to see compulsory status approved.

Kōmei School today is 1 of 18 Tokyo Metropolitan Special Needs Schools for the Physically Disabled (shitai fujiyū tokubetsu shien gakkō).Footnote ¹³ The school is intensively and expertly staffed in technologically equipped state-of-the-art facilities for group and personal instruction. It provides national curriculum and requisite healthcare treatment for children from compulsory primary and middle grades through high school. It has dormitory facilities and transportation for children who need it.

Parents may now choose to send their children to special needs schools or abled schools, against the direction of education administrators. Some parents select standard schools, but they not infrequently require separate classrooms and attendants, which diminish the experience that guardians wish for their children with disabilities (Sakamoto Reference Sakamoto2022). An examination of Kōmei School’s history reveals a legacy of innovation, a record of increasing opportunity, and historic official resistance to expanding compulsory schooling and inclusion.