TOKYO — Before ushering in the Paralympic Games, Tokyo undertook
a wave of projects to make itself more accessible to people with disabilities.
Nearly all train stations now have elevators, and some have safety barriers
along platform edges to protect the visually impaired. About 3,200 newly built
hotel rooms are wheelchair accessible, as are stalls in many public bathrooms.
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Yuto Hirano, a Paralympic volunteer, welcomes the changes. But
as he rolled up one recent afternoon in his wheelchair to a building advertised
as accessible, a nearly imperceptible barrier stopped him in his tracks. He
bumped against a slight incline leading to the automated front doors and could
not get over it without someone pushing his wheelchair from behind.
“There have been three or four occasions where they said, ‘Yes,
we can accommodate you,’ but when I get to the location, I actually cannot
physically get inside,” said Hirano, 31, an accountant for a technology
company. “So I’ve had to turn around and go straight home.”
Paralympic organizers have repeatedly promoted the power of the
Games to draw attention to the needs not only of elite athletes, but all people
with disabilities, speaking loftily of the chance to build a society “free from
discrimination or barriers of any kind.”
Advocates, too, have embraced this grand international moment,
saying it demonstrates how people who live with physical and mental impairments
can achieve at the highest levels. Beyond the inspirational uplift, they say,
the infrastructure changes will help improve the daily lives of people with
disabilities in Japan.
Yet these advocates also wonder how long the attention will last
in a country with a long history of keeping people with disabilities out of
sight. In Japan, many children with disabilities are still educated in separate
schools or classes, large companies operate segregated subdivisions for
employees with disabilities, and people with intellectual disabilities are
often warehoused in institutional facilities.
The “successes are hardly coordinated,” said Mark Bookman, a
historian of disability in Japan who has lived on and off in the country for 13
years. “If you make a school accessible but there is no workplace waiting on
the other end, it doesn’t really matter. If you make the train accessible but
the school is not, it doesn’t really matter. If you make an accessible toilet
in the building but the building itself is not accessible, it doesn’t really
matter.”
“Access is not just a moment where you solve things,” Bookman
said. “Will that process continue after the Olympics, when the international
pressure is gone?”
The questions raised by disability activists are not limited to
the 9.6 million people in Japan whom the health ministry categorizes as
disabled — more than 7 percent of the population. With the world’s oldest
population, Japan will need to accommodate an increasing number of residents
with the kinds of measures that people with various disabilities rely on to get
around every day.
Advocates said the Paralympics offered an opportunity — some
would say missed — to hear from a greater range of people on how to improve
accessibility. If the Games could have been held with international spectators,
they said, it could have provided an instant panel of everyday experts to test
whether measures actually worked in practice.
“I wanted spectators, including people with disabilities, to go
into Paralympic venues, come stay in Tokyo and say, ‘Hey, this is missing, or
this is not good enough,’” Hirano said, “and for a lot of people to feel that
firsthand and put pressure on the government to reform for the better.”
As an example, he pointed to the large, boxy taxis that have
been added to cab fleets in Tokyo to increase accessibility. Wheelchair users
have said that taxi drivers often do not stop when hailed or ask them to pay
extra fees, arguing that rolling out ramps to help them board is cumbersome.
Keisuke Seto, a spokesman for Toyota Japan Taxi, acknowledged
some of the complaints but said that “we have reformed the process of taking
out the ramp to make it easier for drivers,” reducing it from a 63-step to a
24-step process.
Aside from infrastructure, activists said the Paralympics could
motivate people with disabilities who may feel limited in what they can do.
“I know people who have become disabled at some point in their
life and were cooped up in their rooms,” said Daisuke Uehara, who won a silver
medal in para ice hockey at the 2010 Paralympic Winter Games in Vancouver. “But
by participating in sports, they could realize that they could reenter society
again despite their disability. It gives them a sense of possibility.”
Perhaps just as important is the prospect of opening the minds
of able-bodied people.
“Some people think that disabled people cannot do anything,”
said Kazuhiro Uno, an English teacher at the University of Tsukuba School for
the Visually Impaired, who said some of the school’s alumni were competing at
the Games. “I think the Paralympic Games will be a kind of proof or hint for
them.”
Even after banning domestic spectators, the Tokyo organizing
committee has admitted schoolchildren to some of the Paralympic events. Seeing
the sports live, said Seiko Hashimoto, president of the
Tokyo organizing
committee, would help the children to “realize a more inclusive society.”
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