A parliament report has revealed that two nine-year-olds were among the 25,000 people who were forcibly sterilized in Japan as a result of its post-World War Two eugenics law.
People were required to have operations to avoid having children deemed "inferior" by a law that was in place for 48 years.
Many of them suffered from mental illness or physical disabilities.
The 1996 repeal of the law marked the end of what is widely regarded as a dark chapter in Japan's post-war reconstruction.
A long-awaited 1,400-page study from parliament that was based on a government inquiry that started in June 2020 was made public on Monday.
It acknowledged that over 16,000 of the 25,000 operations performed on patients were done so without their consent.
The report revealed that some people were informed they were undergoing common procedures like appendix operations. The surgery could at the time be arbitrarily assigned by local governments.
The two nine-year-olds who underwent sterilization were a boy and a girl, according to the report.
The report was evidence that the government had misled children, according to an 80-year-old victim who was made to have the surgery at the age of 14.
The victim, who went by the pseudonym of Saburo Kita, said, "I would like the state to not shroud the issue in darkness but take our sufferings seriously soon.".
The report has been criticized for failing to explain why it took the law nearly 50 years to be repealed or the rationale for its inception.
On social media, the report has sparked outrage.
Finding out that children as young as nine were sterilised, according to one Twitter user, was sickening.
Another criticized the government for taking too long to overturn the eugenics law and hoped Tokyo would also take a close look at laws that restrict the rights of women and LGBTQ people.
In 2019, Tokyo issued a formal apology and decided to pay each survivor 3.2 million yen ($28,600; £22,100).
Then, in the formal apology, Prime Minister Shinzo Abe stated that the eugenics law caused "great suffering" to its victims.
German, Swedish, and American policies requiring forced sterilization are examples of other nations. They have also expressed regret and provided compensation to victims who are still alive.
