Abstract
The purpose of this paper is to clarify the various aspects of communal life practices of patients in a national sanatorium for Hansen's disease in Japan. I consider an example of small groups that lived in a national sanatorium called Touhoku Shinsei-en in the 1960-70s in order to describe the characteristics of communal life practices of the patients under heavy segregation policies.
The Japanese government's policy toward the patients of Hansen's disease was very cruel in the past. Almost all these patients were obliged to be segregated in national sanatoriums. However, the patients kept struggling for creating better living conditions. In order to make this sanatorium a better place, they took recourse in various activities, often adopting informal, sometimes even non-admitted methods.
Besides clarifying the processes of the creation and development of such communal life practices, this paper also examines the effects and meanings of these practices for the participants. The case study in this paper sheds light on the fact that these patients kept experimenting with new communal life practices repeatedly not only for financial interests but also for the enrichment of their own lives. In concrete terms, their practices have the following connotations: (1) one refers to the securing of various autonomous living zones in the sanatorium by distributing "employment" roles among themselves; (2) another one refers to the creation of slight hope saying that their lives were worth living and to the sharing of these hopes with other patients; (3) the third one pertains to the extension of their living area by establishing contact between patients and non-patients. By understanding the significance of these practices through which the patients of Hansen's disease attempt to enrich their lives, we aim to explore some new aspects of their extremely difficult daily lives.
