Japan kept leprosy patients isolated on Nagashima island until 1996

Japan quarantined leprosy patients on Nagashima island from the 1930s, maintaining forced confinement until 1996 even though effective treatments had existed since the late 1940s. Survivors are now elderly. The policy aimed to combat leprosy, a contagious disease damaging nerves and deforming the body. Authorities sent patients to sanatoriums, including on Nagashima. Cures appeared after World War II, yet the government did not end mandatory isolation for roughly fifty more years. Abolished 30 years ago, the quarantine policy left aging former patients on the island. France 24 reporters met one survivor there, offering rare testimony of that history.