◆IKAWA Hitomi 2025/10/25-26 "Between Illness and Harm: Ambiguity and Identity in SMON Victims' Narratives",　障害学国際セミナー2025,　於：京都（日本）
◇障害学国際セミナー2025 ◇障害学国際セミナー
◇障害学

IKAWA Hitomi 2025/10/25-26 "Between Illness and Harm: Ambiguity and Identity in SMON Victims' Narratives"

■Background

・In the 1960s and 1970s, drug-induced harm became a social issue in Japan.
・The Clioquinol intestinal regulator incident, known as the “SMON” case, established the term “pharmaceutical harm” and influenced subsequent pharmaceutical harm lawsuits.
・“Pharmaceutical harm” is understood in multiple ways depending on context (Sato 2023).
・However, victims' experiences cannot be fully captured by this understanding.
・Moreover, most prior research on victims' experiences has focused on victims who became plaintiffs, with little attention paid to victims prior to becoming plaintiffs or to victims who did not become plaintiffs.
・This study focuses on the memoirs of SMON victim Rieko Watanabe, examining the background leading up to her becoming a plaintiff.

■Purpose ＆ Method

・Qualitative material = Watanabe Rieko (1975).
・Through narrative analysis, it reveals how she interpreted the harm and transformed into a “public accuser”.

Findings

The following four stages were identified in Watanabe's progression to becoming a ‘public accuser’.

1. Skepticism Towards Medicine and the Reconstruction of Meaning
From ‘inexplicable symptoms’ to ‘disability caused by pharmaceutical harm’.
——‘The medicine I took, trusting solely in the power of medicine, was eating away at my legs and eyes’ (p.80)

2. Redefining Identity and its Fluctuations
Whilst asserting, SMON isn't a disease. I want to be called a clioquinol victim’ (p.109), she simultaneously yearned ‘to be just a human being’ and wrestled with joining the lawsuit.

3. The Formation of Collective Identity
‘In this inescapable struggle, it is essential to transform contradictions through one's own body’(p.195).
Inspired by her classmate’s words, she redefines the lawsuit as ‘a forum to denounce societal contradictions,’ leading to her decision to become a plaintiff.

4. The Quest for ‘Restoring Normality’
‘To reclaim my existence in this world, which had been alienated from society due to pharmaceutical harm’ (p.243), she embarks on a struggle to regain ‘ordinary life’ and dignity.

■Considerations ＆ Contributions to Disability Studies

・Watanabe's account is positioned not as an “experience of illness” but as an “experience of victimization”.
・While litigation participation grants recognition, it also entails the constraint of identity fixation.
・Focusing on the ambivalence in victims' narratives is crucial for deepening our understanding of structural suffering—the distress arising from social exclusion and lack of recognition—within disability studies.

■Conclusion

・Victims' transformations are multi-layered and cannot be reduced to the simplistic framework of patients becoming victims and then accusers, as proposed in prior research (Kuriuoka 1986).
・It is vital to include not only the narratives of “accusers” as court participants, but also the “experience of victimization” itself – encompassing silence, conflict, and other elements – within the scope of analysis.
・By introducing the perspective of “experiences of harm”, pharmaceutical harm research can be liberated from being a “litigation-centered narrative”, enabling the complex realities of victims to be visualized from multiple angles.

■Principal References

• １）Kurioka, Mikihide, 1986, ‘Aspects of the Meaning World of Drug Victims,’ in Hozuki, Makoto (ed.), The Sociology of Drug Harm: The Irony of Drugs and Humans, Sekai Shisōsha. (In Japanese)
• ２）Sato, Akihiko, 2023, ‘The Definition and Concept of Drug-Induced Harm,’ in Sato, Akihiko and Hongo, Masatake (eds.), What is Drug-Induced Harm? – A New Sociology of Drug-Induced Harm, Minerva Shobo. (In Japanese)
• ３）Watanabe, Rieko, 1975, Prelude to Love and Struggle: Campus Youth Walked with S.M.O.N., Rippu Shobo. (In Japanese)