Japan's Foremost Human Rights Problem: Lack of Awareness

December 10th is Human Rights Day. On that day in 1948, the United Nations General Assembly (GA) adopted the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR), which was the first global document that expressed the inherent rights of all human beings. Two years later, the GA proclaimed December 10th Human Rights Day. On this Human Rights Day in 2014, I want to do a little reflecting about the state of human rights in my country of origin: Japan.

Today, the notion of human rights has spread across the globe. Yet, human rights violations--ranging from everyday violations to massive and systematic ones--continue to occur in almost every corner of the world. Among these violations, much of the attention, understandably, goes to the most egregious violations that are occurring on the largest scale. So we talk about North Korea's prison camps or the draconian anti-homosexuality law in Uganda (since declared "null and void" by the Constitutional Court), but so many of us often forget that human rights violations do not have to be so horrible or so widespread to be legitimate. Unfortunately, human rights violations occur even in democracies with strong notions of individual rights (see, e.g., the United States).