A new article examines the historical relationship between conscription and disability in modern Japan, arguing that military recruitment systems played a central role in defining, ranking, and excluding disabled people. Through the lens of conscription examinations, wartime health policy, eugenics, military welfare, and postwar disability legislation, it shows how the state distinguished between those considered useful to national mobilisation and those deemed outside its productive or military purposes.

The article traces how disability certification functioned not merely as a medical judgment, but as a form of social classification that shaped citizenship, welfare entitlement, education, and public recognition. It also highlights the unequal treatment of disabled veterans, civilians with disabilities, psychiatric patients, disabled children, and women with disabilities. By connecting wartime policies to postwar welfare structures, the article argues that contemporary disability welfare still bears the imprint of earlier systems organised around labour capacity, military usefulness, and social separation.

Read the full text here in Japanese. Wataru Fujii, published in スポーツ史研究 / Sports History Research, vol. 38, 2025, pp. 67–74, DOI 10.19010/jjshjb.38.0_67.