A committee of the Imperial Diet’s House of Representatives, the lower chamber of Japan’s national legislature from 1890 to 1947, was in the final stages of deliberations on a bill to establish a public health insurance system in February 1938. 

The minutes preserve lawmakers’ fervent appeals: “The state and the people must cooperate, and the citizens must help one another ... to create a system where even the poor and those in economic distress can receive medical care and treatment with peace of mind.” 

At the time, the idea that everyone could obtain medical care at an affordable cost was little more than a dream.

As poverty in rural communities deepened amid the Great Depression, cold-weather damage and crop failures, the government moved to create a national health insurance program to turn........

© The Asahi Shimbun