Home confinement

Under Japan's Mental Patients' Custody Act of 1900, the system by which families could, with official permission, lock a person with mental illness in a room at home. It was prohibited by the Mental Hygiene Act of 1950.

Shuzo Kure of Tokyo Imperial University sent assistants around the country from 1910 to 1916 to inspect 364 confinement rooms. According to his 1918 report, more than half of the rooms were poor or very poor in hygiene, and 78 percent of the people confined were receiving no treatment at all. Kure called it confinement without treatment, and urged that the rooms be abolished at once and patients treated in hospital^[1].

The Mental Hygiene Act of 1950 prohibited housing patients anywhere other than hospitals and other designated facilities, and allowed people already confined at home to remain under the old rules for one year only^[2]. In Okinawa, under American rule, confinement at home under another name continued until the islands returned to Japan in 1972^[3].