Chikara Sakaguchi

Chikara Sakaguchi was born on 1 April 1934 in Hakusan, in the Ichishi district of Mie Prefecture, an area that is now part of the city of Tsu.

He studied at the medical school of Mie Prefectural University, now Mie University, and completed its graduate course in medicine, receiving a doctorate in 1965. After qualifying as a physician he worked at the Japanese Red Cross blood centre in Mie Prefecture, where he later served as director.

Sakaguchi stood for the House of Representatives as a Komeito candidate in the December 1972 general election and won a seat in Mie Prefecture. He became deputy chair of the party's policy council and held the role for about a decade, and in 1986 became chair of the policy council. He lost his seat in the 1980 and 1990 elections but won it back on both occasions, and in all served eleven terms.

After returning to the Diet in 1993 he became Minister of Labour in the non-LDP coalition cabinet of Morihiro Hosokawa, serving until April 1994. When Komeito members joined the New Frontier Party in 1994 he went with them, and after that party broke up he helped rebuild Komeito, becoming its deputy leader and policy chief in 1998.

In December 2000 Prime Minister Yoshiro Mori appointed him Minister of Health and Welfare and Minister of Labour. When the two ministries were merged in January 2001 he became the first Minister of Health, Labour and Welfare, and he kept the post under Junichiro Koizumi until September 2004.

His most lasting decision came in May 2001, when the Kumamoto District Court ruled that the state's isolation of Hansen's disease patients under the leprosy prevention law had been unconstitutional. Against the advice of his own officials, Sakaguchi recommended to Koizumi that the government should not appeal, and he was prepared to resign over it. When the ruling became final he issued an apology to former patients and residents of the national sanatoriums. He later spoke in the Diet in favour of compensating victims of forced sterilisation under the former eugenics law.

After Japan's first case of BSE in 2001 he introduced testing of every slaughtered cow, saying public confidence could not be restored without it. He also handled record unemployment and oversaw reforms to the pension and employment insurance systems, and the Japan Institute for Labour Policy and Training described him as one of the busiest of all the ministers of that period.

He retired from the House of Representatives at the November 2012 dissolution, under a Komeito rule that it would not endorse candidates over 66, and became the party's special adviser on health and labour.

Sakaguchi was married to Hisako Sakaguchi. In 1993 he confirmed in the House of Councillors budget committee that he was a member of the Soka Gakkai Buddhist organisation.

He was a close friend from his early years in the Diet of Naoto Kan, later prime minister, and with Kan and two politicians from other parties formed an informal study group that met regularly. After his own treatment for cancer he founded a patients' association in 2016 to promote immune based cancer therapies. In later life he lived in Takamatsu, Kagawa Prefecture, a city facing the island sanatorium of Oshima Seishoen, where former Hansen's disease patients live.

Chikara Sakaguchi died of old age on 7 August 2026 in Takamatsu, Kagawa Prefecture, at the age of 92. His death was reported by Jiji Press on 12 August.

Komeito leader Toshiko Takeya paid tribute to him, saying the way he had stood alongside ordinary people to the end would remain a guide for those who followed. Former plaintiffs in the Hansen's disease lawsuit told the Asahi Shimbun that he had given them hope.

Sakaguchi is remembered above all as the minister who ended the Japanese state's legal fight against former Hansen's disease patients. His decision not to appeal the 2001 Kumamoto ruling, and his public apology, were a turning point in Japan's reckoning with decades of forced isolation, and former patients continued to regard him with affection for the rest of his life.

As the first Minister of Health, Labour and Welfare he also shaped the merged ministry in its early years, dealing with the BSE crisis, unemployment and pension reform.