"In addition to criticism of policy there has also been criticism of statements made regarding this issue.
In an article published in the Japanese weekly magazine Weekly Bunshun in 1980 (Watanabe [1980]),
Shoichi Watanabe pointed to the high cost of medical treatment given to a hemophiliac patient named Akahito Onishi and asserted that
it was the "sacred duty" of individuals to avoid having children if there is a high chance their offspring would suffer from hemophilia.
Watanabe's position was criticized in several articles, including Kyojin Onishi [1980] and Yokota [1980], cf. Akihito Onishi [1980].
The assertions of Kyoujin Onishi, Akihito Onishi, Akiyuki Nosaka are discussed and examined in Azechi [1981] and Shinohara [1987b:230-234]
(cf. [1987a:30ff]. This debate is also referred to in Kida [1982:195], Oya [1985:24-25], Yagi [1986:144-145], Kazuo Sato [1998:51-52],
and Kitamura [2007].
"In 1980 Shoichi Watanabe stated that those who know they have inferior genes have a social obligation to refrain from having children,
and with this unmistakably pro-eugenics stance violated the greatest taboo of post-war Japan. Of course, this immediately led to a debate of these issues,
but Watanabe was able to keep his position as a professor at a university and suffered almost no social sanction" (Yonemoto [1987c:111]).
Yonemoto sees this as a sign of the breaking down of the post-war mentality (see Chapter 6 Note 43). But is it really?
Even after the war there continued to be earnest and straightforward affirmations of eugenics,
and these may have first began to be taken issue with around this time. The Japanese translator of By Trust Betrayed:
Patients, Physicians, and the Right to Kill in the Third Reich(Gallagher [1995=1996]) writes in the afterword,
"I became concerned about the subjects addressed in this text after reading Sophia University Professor Shoichi Watanabe's article entitled
'Seisei na gimu (A Sacred Duty)' " (Nagase [1996:413])."(Tateiwa[1997→2016])