Writer Hiroshi Shima, who was instrumental in the first damages suit filed by former Hansen's disease patients against the government, died of multiple organ failure Saturday at a hospital in Kitakyushu, his family said. He was 84.
Born in Kagawa Prefecture, Shima, whose real name was Kaoru Kishiue, first learned that he had contracted leprosy in the summer of 1937.
He became a teacher at the predecessor of the Tokyo University of Agriculture and Technology but entered a national center for Hansen's disease, where patients were segregated from the general public, in Kagawa Prefecture in 1947.