14 - Postwar Japanese History Seen through the Science of Reproductive and Population Politics

Summary

This chapter studies post-war Japanese history through the lens of sciences that engaged with reproductive and population politics. It examines two scientifically informed projects, the knowledge of which directly interacted with statecraft in postwar Japan; namely, a bureaucratic exercise to count population numbers in the political turmoil after the Asia-Pacific War and the policy-relevant birth control research headed by Koya Yoshio. Through these cases, this chapter stresses the importance of locating post-war Japan into the transnational context, by arguing that postwar Japanese history was constructed through the reconfiguration of material and political conditions surrounding Japan and beyond.

Introduction

Postwar Japan's history as it relates to reproduction and population is a well-studied topic, approached by scholars from a wide range of disciplinary backgrounds and perspectives. Demographers have contextualized the patterns of reproductive behaviors since the end of World War II in terms of long-term population trends. Social historians and scholars in gender or disability studies have narrated this history in terms of its linkages with various forms of social activism that emerged after Japan's defeat in the war, such as the popular birth control movement, the disability rights movement against abortion and the women's liberation movement. Anthropologists and sociologists have understood this history as mirroring the changing ideas and structures of personhood, kinship and other social relations as Japan was rebuilt from the rubble of the war. Historians of medicine and science have explored the role of medical and scientific theories as well as doctors, healthcare practitioners or scientists in postwar policies and practices in reproductive, infant and maternal health.

An important theme running through the historiography on this topic is politics, manifest in everyday negotiations and public debates over what to do with reproductive bodies. In Japan, reproductive bodies—which Kohama Masako and Matsuoka Etsuko concisely summarize with the expressions “umu, umanai [and] umenai shintai” (bodies that do, do not or cannot bear children)—gradually constituted a subject of political and policy discussion beginning in the 1860s. From this decade onward as Japan was transformed into a modern sovereign power, emerging groups of scientific experts and bureaucrats discussed the new concept of “population” in association with the wealth and health of the nation, along with childbirth as a factor directly affecting population trends.