About Life Station One-Step Katatsumuri

Our group is working toward a society in which everyone can live like human beings. In Japan today, most disabled people face discrimination that confines them to living in a separate world. As soon as it is determined that a new-born child has a disability, the child is separated from other people and consigned to a separate world for his or her whole life. Merely on the ground of having a diasability, the child is treated as abnormal, discriminated against, and shut out from the larger society.

Parents with disabled children often keep them at home because of the strange looks both would get from people in the community. If the parents are no longer able to look after their disabled child, he / she is put in an institution, regardless of his / her own wishes. Institutional life is strictly supervised, with appointed times for everything from meals to bathing and even using the toilet. No visitors are allowed except those approved by the administrators. If the residents try to express their own will even slightly, they are asked how they can say such impudent things when they can't do anything for themself or told that they can't afford to be so picky when they are living at the taxpayers' expense. and should leave if they don't like it. Institutions are run with no regard for the will or human needs of the residents, in the name of institutional management.

Why must we be subjected to such treatment? We disabled people are human beings, too. We also want to live in the community according to our own wills, interacting with able-bodied people. We are often called ignorant of the ways of the world. That is only natural, since we are always being supervised, and transferred from one box to another.

The International Year of the Disabled led to a lot of talk about "normalization" (full participation and equality), since then the national government policy is shifting from institutionalization to life at home. However, many of our disabled friends are still suffering in institutions.

Most disabled people now kept in institutions say they want to leave, but there is no place for them to go. The thought of independent living is frightening for people who have never been allowed to light the stove or pick up a knife, whether at home or in the institution, because it was considered "dangerous". It is very difficult to rent private apartments, and metropolitan public housing is available only to those who apply as households. We disabled people are angry at this society that will not accept us, and feel that we want to -- no, that we must move steadily out into society and live like human beings according to our own wills. To do this, it is essential to have a place to start an independent life, and an organization that supports independent living. The extent of the discrimination faced by and the suffering imposed upon disabled people in Japan is demonstrated by the appearance in recent years of independent living organisations all over the country. Like the snail (katatsumuri in Japanese), we intend to keep working, perhaps slowly but steadily, toward a society in which everyone can live like human beings.

We would appreciate your understanding and strong support.

Life Station One-Step Katatsumuri
4-37-19 Fujimidai
Kunitachi, 186 Tokyo
Japan
tel/fax +81-425-71 3520

Showa-Daiichi@bld

---