The Tokyo District Court, however, stopped short of finding the decades-old “maternity protection” law — one of the world’s most restrictive barriers to sterilisation — to be outright unconstitutional or illegal.
It dismissed the five women’s claim that it is denying them their rights to bodily autonomy.
The landmark lawsuit saw the women unite over innate discomfort with their reproductive abilities, and aversion to what they describe as a patriarchal society that pushes women towards motherhood.
Under the law, a woman must have multiple children with her health at risk, or face life-threatening danger from pregnancy, to qualify for sterilisation. Even then, spousal consent is required.
That bans physicians from performing the procedure on healthy, childless women — such as 29-year-old plaintiff Kazane Kajiya, who never wanted children.
“This is a historic verdict,” Kajiya told reporters, as she and others unfurled a banner outside the court welcoming the ruling as a “step forward”.
Kajiya, who is married and at age 27 flew to the United States to have her fallopian tubes removed, considers her form of happiness “different from what is supposed to be the right answer in Japan”– a rapidly ageing society determined to boost falling birth rates.
But now with the ruling, “I can say I’ve done nothing wrong. I can hold my head high, and walk proudly.”
In what lawyers said was a legal first, presiding judge Masahiro Kamano said women are “guaranteed contraceptive freedom” under the Constitution, and that they can “decide to avoid pregnancy, without interference from the state”.