Japanese Sign Language (日本手話, Nihon Shuwa), also known by the acronym "JSL", is the dominant sign language in Japan.
Little is known about sign language and the deaf community before the Edo period. In 1862, the Tokugawa shogunate dispatched envoys to various European schools for the deaf. The first school for the deaf was not established until 1878 in Kyōto.
It was not until 1948 that deaf children were required to attend school to receive a for...
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Japanese Sign Language (日本手話, Nihon Shuwa), also known by the acronym "JSL", is the dominant sign language in Japan.
Little is known about sign language and the deaf community before the Edo period. In 1862, the Tokugawa shogunate dispatched envoys to various European schools for the deaf. The first school for the deaf was not established until 1878 in Kyōto.
It was not until 1948 that deaf children were required to attend school to receive a formal education.
In the second half of the 20th century, a subtle cultural change in views about the Deaf in Japan evolved. The long-standing concept that "deaf" only means "people who can't hear" emphasized a physical impairment as part of a biomedical disease model; however, this was gradually replaced by a slightly different paradigm. "Deaf people" were more often identified as "people who use Japanese sign language." In other words, the biomedical disability model began slowly to be displaced by a social-cultural or JSL paradigm.
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