Human rights activist Etsuko Kawada, the mother of an outspoken HIV-infected man who contracted the virus through tainted blood coagulants, announced Tuesday her decision to run for the House of Representatives seat of Joji Yamamoto in the Oct. 22 by-election in Tokyo.
Kawada, 51, said she will run for Tokyo's No. 21 constituency in eastern Tokyo as an independent candidate to fill the seat left vacant by Yamamoto, who resigned as a Lower House member earlier this month in the wake of his arrest for allegedly pocketing some 20 million yen of his secretary's salary paid from the government coffers. Kawada lives in Kodaira, adjacent to the constituency.
Kawada's son Ryuhei, 24, was the first HIV-infected plaintiff in a 1989 Tokyo HIV class-action lawsuit who went public with his disease, prompting wider public support for the legal battle against drug makers that distributed tainted blood products and the government that approved the drugs.