TOKYO -- A 92-year-old man in Japan who was placed under the care of a guardian due to what was considered dementia waged a legal battle to cancel the guardianship, after finding the system, meant to protect the assets and rights of people with impaired decision-making capacity, fraught with problems.

The man, a former public servant, was put under adult guardianship in 2021 after a local government applied for the measure by submitting a doctor's note in October 2020, when he was living in central Japan's Chugoku region with his son in his 60s with intellectual disabilities. About four months after the application, a family court granted guardianship, and an appointed guardian began to manage the man's passbooks and other documents.

"They applied for guardianship without giving me an adequate explanation," the 92-year-old fumed during an interview with the Mainichi Shimbun, displaying his distrust toward the local government. What tormented him during his days under guardianship was how the supporters around him stopped listening to his wishes. He was also turned away at government offices and elsewhere unless he was accompanied by his guardian.

"Even when I asked for what others would (normally ask for), the officials told me, 'It can't be helped; this is how the system goes.' They didn't consider my feelings even a bit," the man recalled. He also grew anxious as he felt as if he was being separated from his son by the presence of the guardian.

"Adult guardianship disregards humanity. The system itself has problems," the man told the Mainichi, his body trembling with anger.

Calling a 'family association' seen in newspaper

Just as the man was living in distress, he saw a newspaper article about the launch of "Koken seido to kazoku no kai," a family association comprised of kin of adult guardianship users. He called the group to seek help.

With the association's support, he filed for cancellation of his guardianship in a family court. After a doctor's examination of his condition, the court revoked the guardianship in December 2021, about 10 months after it began.

Was the assigning of a guardian appropriate?

Japan's adult guardianship system was launched in 2000, and is considered a key part of the country's response to addressing the aging society, alongside public nursing care insurance. Under the program, the family court appoints a guardian for a person who has become unable to adequately make decisions due to dementia, intellectual disabilities and other conditions. According to the Supreme Court, 249,484 people were using the system at the end of 2023.

Under the initiative, legal guardianship based on the Civil Code is classified into three types: guardianship, curatorship and assistance. Guardianship is applied to people with the most severely impaired decision-making ability. However, the 92-year-old man, who had long been engaged in agriculture-related civil service after graduating from a national university's faculty of agriculture, appeared during the interview with the Mainichi to be able to speak his mind and retain a certain degree of capacity to judge.

Yasuko Ishii, head of the family association, raised questions about him being assigned a guardian, saying, "He could talk just normally and didn't seem to require guardianship." Tsutomu Taga, a part-time researcher at the Tokyo Metropolitan Institute for Geriatrics and Gerontology, who met the 92-year-old at the request of the family association, also said, "It seems the guardianship system was applied without careful consideration to a person who can make calls and talk about his own problems. I wonder if they didn't have any other options."

The local government that applied for his guardianship apparently did so aiming to help provide some stability to his and his disabled son's lives after assuming that the father's cognitive functions had deteriorated.

Even so, was it appropriate to appoint a guardian, which could greatly restrict the man's freedom? When the Mainichi posed this question to the local government, an official replied, "We will refrain from responding to media interviews from the perspective of protecting personal information."

(Japanese original by Yuji Semba, Tokyo City News Department)