Organizer: Yuki Terazawa, University of California, Los Angeles
Chair: James R. Bartholomew, Ohio State University
Discussants: Margaret Lock, McGill University; Sharon Traweek, University of California, Los Angeles
The purpose of this panel is to explore the ways in which ideas originated in eugenics research were introduced, reviewed and used in Japan from the late nineteenth century and in the twentieth century. Presenters have long been reflecting on the question of why and how the Japanese appropriated a European eugenics theory. That theory not only posited the notions of a Japanese race and Caucasian races, but also the idea that the former was inferior to the latter. Two of us, Sumiko Otsubo and Yuki Terazawa, will discuss the ways in which eugenics ideas were developed and implemented in the Meiji period (1868–1912). Yoko Matsubara will look at the process in which the 1948 Eugenic Protection Law (EPL) was written and enacted, and will argue that the EPL helped establish an even more intensive eugenic policy in the postwar period than that of the prewar period.
Another issue that we will examine is the question how scientific and medical authority has been used to legitimize policy informed by eugenics theory. Moreover, working on different issues and materials, we have found that Japanese eugenic activists paid particular attention to women and their bodies as a crucial site for successful implementation of eugenics theory. By sharing information and arguments that we have developed in our own research, and with assistance from commentators and audience, we hope to generate productive discussions that would bring forth insights about issues involving scientific authority, state reproductive policy and the female body.
Knowledge on the Bodies and the Question of "Race/Nation": Public Health, the State, and Medical Professionals in Meiji Japan
Yuki Terazawa, University of California, Los Angeles
This paper discusses how human bodies became a target of medical and social scientific investigations in the Meiji period (1868–1912). In particular, it focuses on the role of medical professionals in serving new state apparati for generating knowledge on the bodies and for "improving" them.
Throughout the Meiji period, the Japanese medical community avidly transplanted medical knowledge from Europe and the United States. Contrary to similar efforts in the previous period (i.e., the latter half of the eighteenth century and the first half of the nineteenth century), in which imported medical knowledge was used, by and large, for physicians’ treatment of individual patients, medical professionals in the Meiji period tried to use their expertise for public purposes. In fact, such newly built state institutions as the sanitation department in the Home Ministry, the conscript army, the legal system, and educational institutions could not function without the assistance of medical experts. The state began to gather data on individual bodies by such systems as birth and death reports, military conscription examinations, and physical check-ups conducted on school children. Women’s reproduction started to be monitored through institutionalized midwifery that required physicians and midwives to report childbirth (and/or stillbirth) to local municipal offices. Using such tools as statistics, the state also produced knowledge on medical and health conditions of the Japanese as an aggregate. It was only by employing such knowledge that Japanese eugenics activists could discuss the quality of the "Japanese race," which they believed to exist.
Medicalization of Race Improvement Theory and the Female Body: Osawa Kenji and Eugenic Thought in Meiji Japan
Sumiko Otsubo, Creighton University
"Eugenics" is a term coined in 1883 by British scientist Francis Galton to describe the idea that human genetic stock could be improved by selective breeding. The boundary between the "fit," who were encouraged to reproduce, and the "unfit" often coincided with boundaries of "race," gender, and class. It is thus intriguing to ask why some Japanese adopted and adhered to the Western science of eugenics even though it seemed to prescribe inferior status to the Japanese in the white-dominated "racial" hierarchy. In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, Japanese leaders, aspiring to make Japan the equal of industrial and "civilized" Western nations, launched sweeping political, economic, social, and cultural modernization programs. Eugenics may have been a "biological" approach to this comprehensive modernization/Westernization plan.
In this study I will explore the eugenic writings of physiologist Osawa Kenji (1852–1927). He was the first to "medicalize" race improvement discourse, which had been dominated by non-medical professionals including Fukuzawa Yukichi. Osawa’s ideas were significant in the history of eugenics in Japan also because he emphasized woman’s body as a strategic site to improve the constitution of the Japanese race. Moreover, he allowed feminists and social reformers, particularly temperance activists (kinshuundoka), to appropriate his scientific authority hoping that they, in return, would help him put his eugenics proposals into practice. By examining Osawa’s ideas, I will aim at demonstrating the complex ways in which a Japanese medical expert employed scientific theories of European origin to help advance the interests of his compatriots.
The Making of the Eugenic Protection Law of 1948: Reinforcing Eugenic Policy after WWII
Yoko Matsubara, Ochanomizu University
In this presentation, I will reconsider the historical process in which the 1948 Eugenic Protection Law (EPL), establishing Japan’s postwar eugenic policy, was written and was implemented. I will reexamine the widely accepted hypothesis that the EPL, for the most part, inherited eugenic ideas from the 1940 National Eugenics Law, modeled on the 1933 Nazi Sterilization Law, designed to prevent those with hereditary diseases from reproducing. I maintain that the 1948 EPL took on characteristics of eugenic legislation implemented in various other countries than Nazi Germany, because it greatly broadened the goals of eugenic policy. For example, in addition to sterilizing those with hereditary diseases, people with such infectious disease as leprosy became targets for sterilization.
Furthermore, I will analyze how eugenics discourse shaped postwar debates on the question under which circumstances abortion should be permitted. One of the reasons that eugenic activists endorsed loosening abortion regulations was because they were concerned about the phenomenon of gyaku-tota (reversed natural selection), the process in which good human stocks are reduced while bad ones are increased. They believed that gyaku-tota would occur because highly educated people from upper and middle classes, who they thought would reproduce superior progeny, frequently used birth control methods, while couples from lower classes did not, thus, leaving a high number of progeny of lesser quality. Some considered that to make it easier to obtain abortions was a means to mitigate this problem. I contend that relaxing restrictions on abortion under the EPL helped implement an even more rigid eugenic policy than that of the prewar period, expanding the targets of sterilization and intensifying the practice of compulsory sterilization.