In July, Japanese Prime Minister Kishida Fumio met with some 130 plaintiffs and other related parties involved in several lawsuits against the Japanese government. The plaintiffs are seeking damages for forced sterilization operations carried out under the Eugenics Protection Law (Yusei Hogo Ho), a piece of Occupation-era legislation (later amended, now abolished) that made abortion, forced sterilization, and other abuses of human dignity a feature of Japan’s postwar years. Prime Minister Kishida, acting in the wake of a July 3 Japanese Supreme Court ruling that declared the sterilizations done under the Eugenics Protection Law, and the law itself, unconstitutional, apologized on behalf of the government, acknowledging the “tremendous physical and mental anguish” the plaintiffs had endured and ordering that they be paid restitution. “Over the course of forty-eight years, from 1948 to 1996,” Prime Minister Kishida said during the meeting, “no fewer than 25,000 people were gravely victimized by sterilization operations carried out due to their suffering from certain diseases or disabilities. I am overwhelmed with sorrow at what has happened.”

The prime minister’s words of contrition are welcome, but they fall far short. For one thing, the government’s sincerity was called into question in May when Ito Shintaro, Minister of the Environment, was in Minamata City in southern Kumamoto Prefecture visiting with those affected by Minamata disease, a horrible condition caused by ingesting seafood containing mercury discharged from a Chisso factory in Minamata. During a hearing after a memorial service for Minamata sufferers, an elderly man named Matsuzaki Shigemitsu was explaining to Minister Ito that his wife, a Minamata victim, had died in April of 2023 while saying, “Oh, the pain, oh, the pain.” In the middle of this sentence, someone from Minister Ito’s bureaucratic staff cut off Mr. Matsuzaki’s microphone.

The explanation? “You went over the allotted three minutes.”

Minister Ito later apologized for the incident, but the damage was done. The Japanese government has been notoriously indifferent to Minamata sufferers. Following his staff’s treatment of Mr. Matsuzaki, the government will once again have to explain—as Prime Minister Kishida did to an audience of those surgically mutilated by government order—that those in positions of power really do care about the lives of ordinary people.

These and other recent developments surrounding human life issues in Japan—including the Japanese government’s approval last year of mifepristone and misoprostol, murderous substances that cause untold suffering for both unborn babies and their mothers—have made me think about what government is at its most basic level. The suffering government causes seems to me to be precisely what, at heart, government is about. The crimes of government are many, but to my mind they all stem from one original sin. Government comes into being when some lives are held to count for nothing, and when the state proclaims that it gets to decide who lives and who dies. The state assumes the prerogative to kill as it likes—that is what makes it the state. By the same token, the state sees fit to treat people like husbanded cattle, removing their organs as it wishes, subjecting them to scientific experiments, doing away with them to save money for other ventures (usually wars and other mass killings). If so-called Biopolitics really is the nature of the state, then the eugenic travesty for which Prime Minister Kishida apologized in July is not going away, not from Japan, not anywhere. We are all subject to the whims of some state or other that has designs on the life given to us by God.

Consider that despite the apologies for various outrages against the human person by the Japanese government and other governments around the world, the fact remains that almost all government-sanctioned suffering goes un-apologized for. The United States federal government gave judicial imprimatur to more than sixty million in utero executions starting in 1973, for example. Far from apologizing for this horror (or for helping to effect the Eugenics Protection Law in Japan), many in the same government push for more and more killing. The one major American political party that claimed to be against abortion moved on from the issue this year, an anti-life volte face that surprised many, but not, I must say, me. Whatever platitudes those in government might offer in defense of life, whatever remorse for murdering and harming innocents that politicians might evince when standing in front of microphones, the fact remains that government goes on killing. It is the one thing that all governments everywhere have in common.

Killing is what governments do. It is whence governments claim to derive their sovereign power, as all political sovereignty begins and ends with control over life and death. Prime Minister Kishida can—and should—apologize much more for his government’s long history of eugenic driven hatred. But no apology will end state-sponsored eugenics, in Japan or anywhere.