deinstitutionalized. But because society did not accept them based on the values of people without disabilities, they were hurt and isolated. Reflecting that mere "integration" segregates people with disabilities in society, a way was sought that would lead to equal relations between people with and without disabilities. Thus, the self-advocacy movement of people with disabilities has been developed as a as a subculture of society since the late 1980's. "Popcorn" is a symbol of this movement.
3. Duskin Leadership Training Program for Persons with Disabilities
The Duskin Co. Ltd. has been promoting overseas training projects for the purpose of training leaders of people with disabilities since the International Year of Disabled Persons (1981). In the first decade of the program, individual long-term (three months to a year) study and training abroad was conducted;about eighty persons with disabilities were sent, mainly to the United States. Among them, three people with intellectual disabilities were included. In the second phase of this program, it was conducted as a group program; about twenty people with intellectual disabilities were sent to Sweden and the United States over a three-year period.
Starting with the third phase, the program returned to individual long-term training. Although the possibility of the participation of people with disabilities was uncertain, a young man from Nagasaki City was sent, together with a volunteer partner from the Nagasaki Prefecture Social Welfare Council, to Gothenburg, Sweden, for a shortened period of 1 1/2 months starting in September, 1995; he had the opportunity to experience and study community living.
4. Legal Advocacy on Developmental Disability (LADD)
LADD sent two people -- a person with a disability and a lawyer -- to the United States in the summer and autumn of 1995 to get training in legal advocacy (a social reform movement based on the legal system).LADD was organized as a result of a 1994 training tour by a group of lawyers called the Human Rights Lawyers' Advocacy Group about Problems Facing People with Disabilities (Tokyo), that included people with disabilities; the tour group studied movements advocating the rights of people with disabilities in the United States. LADD aims to learn about such activities in the United States and set up similar activities in Japan.
Additionally, as the result of an initiative of the Japan Council on Independent Living Centers, about thirty persons, including ten people with disabilities, participated in a Conference on Support for Independent Living held in Sacramento, California, in October, 1995. In exchange, the leader of the People First movement in the United States, himself a person with a disability, came to Japan in January 1996, and gave lectures in many places.
