Newly elected Upper House lawmaker Ryuhei Kawada was diagnosed with hemophilia soon after he was born.
Like many other Japanese hemophiliacs, Kawada began being treated with foreign blood products that were not heated. Warnings had been issued overseas in the 1980s, however, about the dangers of nonheated blood products and they had been barred from use abroad.
And like many fellow hemophiliacs here, Kawada subsequently became infected with HIV. Some 2,000 Japanese became infected via unheated blood products starting in the 1970s, when the products were introduced to Japan, until the problem was exposed in the 1980s in a scandal that shook the country's health-care system to the core.