Conclusion

Summary

Japan today is known for the world’s most aged population. Faced with the challenge, policymakers deliberate on policies to curb the demographic trend, based on the material provided by population experts. But, why are these population phenomena seen as problematic in the first place? What are the roles of population experts in turning the demographic trend into a government matter? Science for Governing Japan’s Population tackles these questions. It examines medico-scientific fields developed in Japan in 1860s–1960s around the notion of population and analyzes the role of the population experts in the government’s effort to manage its population via policies. It argues that the formation of population sciences in modern Japan had a symbiotic relationship with the development of the neologism, “population” (jinkō), and with the transformation of Japan into a modern sovereignty. Through historical study, the book unpacks assumptions we have for the links between population, sovereignty, and science.

Science–Policy Nexus for Governing Shifting Demographic Realities, 1960s–2010s

Given the profound changes the Japanese population has undergone in the time since Shinozaki and Koya lobbied for birth control in the wake of WWII, one wonders how the two bureaucrats-cum-scientists would react to the population trend today. As opposed to the “high birth, high death” model presented in the 1947 vital statistics – the first official statistics published after the war – the latest statistics from 2016 clearly show the Japanese population following a “low birth, low death” model (Figure 7.1). Moreover, in contrast to 1947, when the population was growing by 19.7 per 1,000 population, in 2016, the population is contracting by 2.6 per 1,000 population. Life expectancy has also increased enormously, from 57.68 and 60.99 years for men and women in 1950 to 80.98 and 87.14 in 2016, respectively.¹ Due to drastic changes over the past seven and a half decades, the Japanese population, once vibrant and youthful, is now shrinking and aging (Figure 7.2).

Figure 7.1 Crude birth rates, crude mortality rates, and population increase rates in Japan, 1947–2016.

Source: Ministry of Health, Labour and Welfare of the Government of Japan, “Wagakuni no jinkō dōtai. Tōkeihyō,” www.mhlw.go.jp/toukei/list/81-1a.html, accessed July 6, 2021

Figure 7.2 Population by age group and proportion of those aged 65 years and over, 1920–2065, cited from the National Institute of Population and Social Security Research, Population and Social Security in Japan 2019, IPSS Research Report No. 85, July 26, 2019, p. 3, www.ipss.go.jp/s-info/e/pssj/pssj2019.pdf, accessed July 16, 2021

Like in the periods covered in this book, after the 1960s, the shifting demographic realities, and the constantly changing population discourse that accompanied it, continued to act as a root of the story surrounding the interplay between the science of population and the state’s effort to manage its population size and quality.² In the early 1960s, the dramatic fall in the Total Fertility Rate (TFR) from previous decades – from 4.54 children per woman in 1947 to 2.0 in 1960 – catalyzed this interplay.³ While technical bureaucrats and policy intellectuals who were at the prime of their careers in the late 1940s might have celebrated the fertility decline as dissipating the problem of “overpopulation,” their successors in the early 1960s were worried that the same phenomenon might slow down the unprecedented pace of economic growth in Japan by causing a drastic shrink in the cohorts of working age persons in the near future.⁴ Linked to this, they were also concerned that the child mortality rate, though declining in general, was still high compared to the United States and European countries, and infant mortality still posed a serious problem in rural areas.⁵ In this context, they presented the idea of tackling the problems of an imminent labor shortage and child health through measures aiming to “improve population quality” by specifically targeted younger populations. The notion of “population quality” justified eugenic policies during WWII (see Chapter 4), but “population quality,” as reformulated in the early 1960s, referred more broadly to the quality of “a fundamental, mental, and physical state of an individual determining the characteristics of a human group called population,” as defined by the Foundation-Institute for Research of Population Problems (IRPP).⁶ Arguably, it would be “improved” not only through eugenic policies like genetic screening but also through other wide-ranging social policies, such as child-support allowance and educational reform.⁷

Along with this, from the late 1950s onward, policymaking and policy-relevant research began to prioritize population quality. Sometime around 1958, population experts affiliated with the IRPP, including technical bureaucrats from relevant ministries, began to launch investigations into population quality.⁸ In 1959, with a MHW research fund, a research team headed by Nagai Tōru, and also including Tachi and the economist Terao Takuma, launched a project to study the policy implications of the population quality problem.⁹ Around the same time, the ACPP began to collect experts’ opinions on population quality.¹⁰ Based on this research, between 1959 and 1962, the IRPP Committee on Population Measures (IRPP-CPM) Second Special Committee deliberated on measures to improve population quality.¹¹ In May 1962, the IRPP submitted the Proposal for the Outline of Measures on the Improvement of Population Quality to the minister of health and welfare.¹² The ACPP drafted a policy document based on the IRPP proposal, and in July 1962, it announced the Resolution on the Measures to Improve Population Quality.¹³ Based on these recommendations, the 1962 White Paper of Health and Welfare had a whole chapter dedicated to the “improvement of population quality.”¹⁴ As a result, the MHW set up the Department of Population Quality within the Institute of Population Problems in 1963.¹⁵ In the first half of the 1960s, population experts’ awareness of a fertility decline quickly turned “population quality” into a buzzword in policy discussions and policy-relevant research on population.

As the new discourse of “population quality” was emerging, fertility in Japan kept falling and eventually went below what population experts called the net reproductive rate of 1.0 – the level at which a population could reproduce itself from one generation to the next without increasing or decreasing. Faced with this phenomenon, the 1964 White Paper of Health and Welfare problematized fertility decline as a cause of this phenomenon. The official recognition of further fertility decline led to two phenomena within policymaking: First, it consolidated the argument in favor of improving “population quality.” Second, it gave rise to the narrative that the government needed to promote “social development” (shakai kaihatsu), which would indirectly boost fertility by removing various socioeconomic factors that were currently discouraging women from having babies.

Prior to this period, social development, a term originally coined by the United Nations in the 1950s to enable a more holistic approach to development, did not resonate with Japanese politicians and policymakers. Since the end of the occupation, the whole country was geared toward a reconstruction that was overly reliant on economic development.¹⁶ But a decade later, political leaders in Japan became more susceptible to the concept as they were confronted with an increase in cases of serious pollution and damages to human health that suggested the adversarial effects of the economic-centric reconstruction effort.¹⁷

This is when Tachi and social policy specialist Ibe Hideo introduced “social development” in Japan, translating it into Japanese as shakai kaihatsu and defining it as the “development of the societal aspects of cities, villages, lodging, transportation, health, medicine, public health, social welfare, education, and so on” and “an attempt to directly improve human capacity and welfare.”¹⁸ Following this translation, for the rest of the 1960s, population experts began investigating various topics associated with education, town planning, public infrastructure, health and welfare, and other provisions associated with “social development” that were affecting people’s lives. “Social development” came to underpin the government’s commitment to social and welfare policy. In his inaugural speech in November 1964, Prime Minister Satō Eisaku proclaimed, “the promotion of social development will be the basis of [my government’s] domestic policy … with a long-term perspective … to create a high-quality welfare state.”¹⁹ After the speech, on December 11, 1964, Economic Planning Secretary Takahashi Mamoru submitted the Basic Plan on Social Development to Satō.²⁰ Based on the plan, the guidelines for the government budget for the 1965 fiscal year stressed that it would be allocated to measures promoting social development and “regional development” (chiiki kaihatsu), another concept that overlapped with social development.²¹ In the 1960s, social development surged as a catchphrase in policymaking, causing momentum for issuing major post-WWII health and welfare provisions, such as the Law on Social Welfare for the Elderly in 1963.

The emphasis on “population quality” and “social development” continued to center the policy discussions and research on population well into the early 1970s. However, during this time, the TFR suddenly increased because the cohort of baby boomers born in the late 1940s and early 1950s had babies. Although the surge in fertility was fleeting, policymakers and policy intellectuals became concerned that this phenomenon, in conjunction with sliding mortality rates, would push the population increase rate up over 12.0 per 1,000, whereas it had been kept in the single digit range in the 1960s. Under these circumstances, the narrative of “overpopulation” returned.

Against this backdrop, in July 1974, eminent policy intellectuals and family planning activists who had influenced the official discussion in the late 1940s – not least of whom was Shinozaki – organized the Japan Population Conference (Nihon Jinkō Kaigi), the largest population conference after WWII. Aiming to “study and discuss the various kinds of population questions which challenge the Japanese people to seek policies and actions appropriate for the future,” the conference was not merely an abstract intellectual exercise but also clearly accountable for the government’s population management effort, just like the Fourth National Conference on Population Problems held during the war (see Chapter 4). The conference therefore mirrored official concerns about the growing population. Partly in response to the environmental activism that arose during this period, and partly in response to the revitalization sentiments that dominated prewar discussions on resources within the NRS in the late 1940s, the conference problematized Japan’s growing population in terms of its precarious status as a resource poor but densely populated nation, aiming to exchange dialog over “the resource-food-environment problems [which] recently have grown critical in many aspects.”²² At the conference, population experts involved in policymaking, including Muramatsu Minoru at the DPHD (see Chapter 6), discussed “Population, Resources and Food” and “Stabilization of Population and Strategy for Action.”²³ At the end of the conference, participants “call[ed] for the Japanese Government’s immediate action” on the recommendations they made, which, like in the early 1950s, included promoting new contraceptive methods and “population education through mass media.”²⁴ Like the recommendations made by the IC-PFP in the early 1930s (see Chapter 3), the conference also requested the government to facilitate the “expansion of demographic research institutions.”²⁵ The conference was designed to crystallize the science–policy nexus that was central to the state’s population management exercise.

However, the return of the “overpopulation” discourse in the first half of the 1970s was short lived. In 1974, the TFR began to decrease, and this time, the fertility decline was gradual but persistent; despite minor fluctuations from year to year, the TFR kept falling and never rose significantly until 2005. Policymakers expressed concerns about the downward trend as early as 1977, as evident in the White Paper of Health and Welfare published that year.²⁶ They knew fertility decline would further accelerate the population aging that was already underway. In 1970, the ratio of the Japanese population of individuals sixty-five years old and older to the total population exceeded 7.0% for the first time since vital statistics were available. Throughout the 1970s, the figure kept rising, and the media extensively covered Japan becoming an aging society. Along with this, the government, fueled by an unprecedented high economic growth since the mid-1950s, was expanding social security provisions for older populations, which culminated in offering free healthcare to the elderly in 1973.²⁷ However, the economic downturn Japan experienced in 1974, a result of the previous year’s global oil crisis, urged policymakers to revise the government’s generous spending on social security. In this context, policymakers were worried that a prolonged fertility decline might put further pressure on the government budget by exacerbating problems associated with an aging population.

While officially acknowledging the need to tackle issues related to fertility decline and aging population, the government did little to fundamentally solve these problems until the 1990s.²⁸ In fact, faced with a tightened social security budget, for much of the 1970s and 1980s, the government established social policies that ended up farming out childcare and elderly care to individual families.²⁹ These policies worked out quite nicely for a while, especially among the urban middle class. Their nuclear family structure, buttressed by the gendered division of labor whereby men were expected to engage in waged work while women were looking after the families, filled the social welfare gap created by the government’s stringent measures.³⁰ However, these policies, heavily relying on gender norms and the nuclear family model, ironically transpired to speed up the fertility decline. In addition to the consolidation of the “housewifization” of women, in the 1980s Japan also witnessed expanding work opportunities for them, symbolized by the enactment of the Equal Employment Opportunity Law in 1986. Furthermore, during this period the nuclear family model was dominating the public narrative of familyhood, but in reality, it was eroding, as young men and women were increasingly deciding to marry later, or not marry at all.

These situations eventually resulted in the 1989 phenomenon sensationalized by the media as the “1.57 shock”; the TFR that year was even lower than the lowest post-WWII record of 1.58 in 1966.³¹ Due to extensive media coverage of the “1.57 shock,” in the 1990s, fertility decline became widely recognized as a social problem. The government expressed it as a problem strongly tied to issues related to an aging population, as attested by the mobilization of the term, shōshi kōreika shakai, “a society moving toward an aging population with a smaller number of children,” which appeared in official documentation starting in the mid-1990s.³² Along with this language, the government quickly established measures for declining fertility and an aging population. In 1994, it announced the five-year Angel Plan as the first policy package to tackle the issue of fertility decline, and it has updated the plan since then. Through the plan, the government launched a succession of programs that were designed to expand childcare services and make workplaces more family friendly. In 1989, the government formalized the Gold Plan, a ten-year strategy aimed to build infrastructure that would enable the state to provide health and welfare services for the elderly by 2000. However, the government was unable to implement many of the measures presented in the plan due to the financial pressure caused by the burst of the bubble economy in the early 1990s. Furthermore, these government policies, though intending to relieve family members of the burden of child and elderly care, in reality still relied on families as a source for care providers. At the same time, over the course of the decade, more families were unable to provide the required care, as labor became increasingly precarious and the family structure became diversified. Consequently, gaps between policies and realities widened further, which resulted in a further drop in the TFR.

Japan has inherited last century’s demographic legacies. The TFR continued to decline, hitting the lowest-ever in 2005 at 1.26 children per woman. Since then, it has been gradually going up, though it is still well below the replacement level,³³ while the ratio of individuals sixty-five years of age and older to the total population has been increasing at a phenomenal rate. The ratio was 17.4 at the end of 1999, and by 2020 it had risen to 28.4. Confronted with these demographic realities, the government has been expanding and diversifying social policies to tackle what it now categorically perceives as the twin problems of declining fertility and an aging population. The government enacted the Basic Law for Measures against the Declining Fertility Rate and the Law for Measures to Support Raising Next-Generation Children in 2003 and set up major outlines for measures in 2010 (“Vision for Children and Childcare”) and 2015 (“Outline of Measures against Declining Fertility”). This time, policymakers tried to tackle work-related issues, such as long-term economic hardship among young people due to precarious labor, working long hours, low- and double-income households, and a lack of childcare provisions. These issues were acting as major disincentives to have children, so they stressed measures fostering a “work and life balance.”³⁴

For elderly care, the government enacted the Long-Term Care Insurance Law (LTCI) in 1997, and in 2000, introduced the mandatory insurance-based care system for the elderly, based on the infrastructure built under the Gold Plan and the eight welfare-related acts revised in the 1990s.³⁵ More recently, the government, recognizing the imminence of the “2025 vision” – the baby boomer cohort joining the age group of seventy-five years old and older and a contracting population of younger generations, who were previously expected to care for the elderly – established a number of measures to “mobilize” the elderly.³⁶ In 2005, it reformed the LTCI to shift its emphasis from care to prevention and independence for those with low levels of care needs. Since the early 2010s, the government has been promoting the “community-based integrated care system,” which is attached to another, older scheme that aimed to build a large community of healthy elderly who could function as a peer-support group for their frailer peers. Linked to this, the Ministry of Health, Labour and Welfare collaborates with the public corporation National Silver Human Resources Center Association to secure further employment for the elderly. Since April 2021, the amended Elderly Persons Employment Stabilization Law has been in place, which encourages business owners to secure employment opportunities up to the age of seventy. Through these social policy measures, the Japanese government has been clearly endorsing “active aging,” a buzzword and policy framework that has been circulating globally since the early 2000s.³⁷

For a long time, communities of population experts in Japan have concentrated their energy into studying policy-relevant topics. In addition to the activities of population experts mentioned above, since the end of WWII, the research of the IPP (today, it is the National Institute of Population and Social Security Research, IPPS) and the Population Association of Japan (PAJ) clearly shows affinity with the government’s policy agenda concerning population issues.³⁸

This affinity with policymaking, however, is a double-edge sword for the community of population scientists in Japan who wish to expand their field. On the one hand, over the post-WWII period, the proximity to the government permitted population science to thrive in Japan as policy science. On the other hand, in part due to the magnified role of population science in state politics, demography’s potential to grow into an academically rigorous discipline was overlooked.³⁹ According to eminent demographer Atoh Makoto, the historical legacies covered in this book, such as the official endorsement of population/race policies and research (Chapter 4) during WWII and the over-concentration of efforts in policy-relevant birth control research immediately after the war (Chapters 5 and 6), were culpable; they had discouraged universities from investing their resources into population science.⁴⁰ All these factors made population studies a somewhat neglected subject in academia, while the Japanese government’s recognition of its importance grew significantly over this period.

Yet, as argued in Chapter 6, post-WWII population policies and research in Japan were not solely shaped by the abovementioned domestic factors. In fact, as fertility in Japan declined, Japanese policymakers and population scientists increased the country’s involvement in the transnational movement to contain the world population, which, from the mid-1960s, came to coalesce into the global politics of development and health promotion even further.⁴¹

The Domestic and the Global in the Science–Policy Nexus

In the 1960s, as the TFR in Japan dropped, birth control became less relevant within Japanese policymaking, and the government began to invest in international cooperation and development aids involving family planning.⁴² Along with this, population experts who had established their careers via the policy-relevant birth control research in the 1950s channeled more of their energy into the transnational scientific exchange.

The Japanese government’s interest in this field was influenced by a number of interlinked domestic and transnational factors. Within Japan, attempts to urge the government to participate in this field culminated in the 1960s, in part due to the campaign led by the health and family planning activist Kunii Chōjirō. In the 1950s, Kunii made himself known among the circle of family planning activists in Japan, but, foreseeing reduced demands for family planning, in the 1960s, he began to explore expanding his activism overseas. To convince influential politicians and economic leaders in Japan to join forces with him, in 1967, Kunii arranged for the American William Draper, a special advisor to the International Planned Parenthood Federation (IPPF) and a staunch proponent of global population control, to visit Japan. Draper met with eminent figures in business and politics, most importantly Kishi Nobusuke and Sasakawa Ryōichi, and stressed the importance of Japan’s cooperation in the field of family planning and population in Asia. After Draper’s visit, with the support of Kishi and Sasakawa, Kunii established the Japanese Organization for International Cooperation in Family Planning (JOICFP) in 1968, a nongovernmental organization approved by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the MHW and originally funded by the Health Center (Hoken Kaikan) and the IPPF.⁴³ Thereafter, the Japanese government began making donations to international organizations specializing in family planning and/or population issues, starting with the IPPF in 1969. By the mid-1970s, Japan had become one of the major donors within international cooperation on family planning, ranking in the top five after the United States, Sweden, West Germany, and the Netherlands.⁴⁴

Japan’s move was in line with the trend in the transnational population control movement described in Chapter 6, which merged with global health promotion from the mid-1960s onward. Especially after the US government decided to fund population programs as part of its overseas development aid program, family planning became a staple in international health initiatives. In 1966, the United Nations General Assembly agreed to launch an organization that would help states develop population programs, and the United Nations Fund for Population Activities (UNFPA) was created in 1969. In 1967, the World Bank also began to fund population programs. Along with existing funding bodies, these international organizations became major donors in the field, fostering the integration of family planning with development aid health projects.

In this context, Japanese population experts and researchers who specialized in reproductive medicine, especially those in the IPP and IPH (Chapters 5 and 6), put more effort into transnational exchange. Muramatsu, for instance, actively attended international conferences and published in English to communicate his research to colleagues across the world. He also led international seminars on family planning that were organized by the JOICPF and taught about Japan’s success with the state-led family planning program. As an institution, the PAJ organized and led a core symposium of the Eleventh Pacific Science Congress, held in Tokyo in 1966, titled “Population Problems of the Pacific.” In the 1970s, the IPH and PAJ were heavily involved in organizing the Second Asian Population Conference that was held in Tokyo in 1972.⁴⁵ Finally, at the aforementioned Japan Population Conference, Japanese participants, including Muramatsu and Shinozaki, conversed with eminent figures in global population control, including Draper and Rafael Salas (Executive Director, UNFPA), who were invited for the occasion.

In the process of extending its network globally, Japanese population experts and activists also concentrated on forging regional ties in Asia. In the 1970s, the PAJ extended its international network by dispatching members to the Population Information Network to the United Nations Economic Commission for Asia and Far East (ECAFE; in 1974 it became the Economic and Social Commission for Asia and the Pacific, ESCAP).⁴⁶ Moreover, the Declaration of the Japan Population Conference called for the “promotion of increasing assistance for the developing countries in Asia … and cooperation with other international organizations such as … UNFPA and IPPF.”⁴⁷ The preeminence of Asia in Japanese population activities was directly compatible with the government’s agenda to provide overseas development aid; in the early days of Japan’s commitment to overseas development aid and international cooperation, Asia was without doubt the priority. This Japanese focus on Asia’s population and development, both by the government and population experts, was informed by questions related to Japan’s sovereignty that emerged as a result of Japanese colonialism and US-centric Cold War geopolitics. As much as the trajectory of Japanese sovereignty influenced the development of various medico-scientific population fields in Japan in the modern period, the globalization of Japanese population science and policy over the latter half of the twentieth century was spurred by Japan’s perceived position in world politics, in the past and present.

Population, Development, and Social Orders

This story is not only about how politics influenced the globalization of Japanese population science and Japan’s population management. It is also about how social orders realigned through the process of this globalization. Narratives inscribed in the Japanese science–policy nexus in favor of population control, which hitherto exposed and perpetuated preexisting social hierarchies domestically within Japan, extended globally and paved the way for the coproduction of social marginalization within Japan and global population control. For instance, the discourse associating fecundity with underdevelopment that informed Koya’s experiment with foam tablets (Chapter 6) ultimately rendered villagers in Kajiya and Khanna not only as targets of Japanese and global population control but also fixed them within a lower social stratum. Similarly, in the 1960s, when “social development” surged as a policy agenda within Japan and the Japanese government embarked on providing overseas development aid, a Japanese expert studying population quality for social development portrayed the peripheral region of Tohoku – long associated with economic hardship and underdevelopment (Chapter 3) – as the “Tibet of Japan,” attempting to stress the region’s need for development.⁴⁸ The comparison of Tohoku with Tibet was buttressed by the chauvinistic progressivism inscribed in social science theories, including demographic transition theory (Chapter 5), which promoted the global developmentalist discourse that singled out Asia as a region in need of population control. By applying this globally circulating, ableist discourse to an “underdeveloped” region within Japan’s internal borders, Japanese population experts and policymakers ultimately served to marginalize the region in post-WWII narratives of economic growth and social advancement, while also consolidating the status of Asia as a site of intervention in world politics. Through this, Japan’s internal peripheries and Asia in general were simultaneously assigned the role of “recipients” of development assistance, occupying the lower end of the hierarchical relationship between “donors” and “recipients” that buttressed the global politics of development and population control.

The coproduction of domestic and global social orders was, in part, a byproduct of the Japanese aspiration to extricate the nation from the status of “mid-developed country” (chūshinkoku), a label some Japanese perceived as dishonorable because it allegedly described Japan’s socioeconomic regression after WWII. The byproduct of this coproduction was the eliding of the agency of the population control target. For example, consider Koya’s policy-relevant birth control research discussed in Chapter 6. Through fieldwork, people – mostly married women – were asked to provide detailed information about the frequency of sexual intercourse, the use or nonuse of contraceptives, their menstrual history, and their experience of pregnancy and abortion. The information provided important data for the production of scientific knowledge, which was used to present the efficacy of the Japanese birth control pilot projects to an international audience. However, through the process of turning the information into scientific knowledge, the research participants’ distinct sexual and reproductive experiences were translated to fit a “family line,” a standardized – globally discernible – format, represented in numbers, chronological lines, and charts (see Figures 6.4 and 6.5).⁴⁹ Through this process, the messy and personal details of sexual experiences, which reflected research participants’ agency but resisted numerical representation (such as the reasons why couples decided to stop using certain contraceptives or why people decided to discontinue their participation in the research), were stripped away to construct coherent datasets.

Needless to say, this was regarded as an essential component in the process of producing legible demographic knowledge for specialists, policymakers, and the general public. By the time Koya’s team conducted the research, globally it had long been assumed as part of “modern” and “objective” science. However, modern data collection systems affected the construction of demographic facts, and they were far from value-free, inscribing Eurocentric and masculinist understandings of gender, class, civilization, and history onto them.⁵⁰ Japanese population studies followed the chauvinistic perspective embedded in this methodology, and as a consequence, they allowed little space for representing the agency of the “governed” individuals in the state-led population-governing endeavor.

One implication of the development of the science–policy nexus for the governing of a population covered in this book might be that policies informed by science failed to respond to the real needs of the governed population, whose sexual and reproductive behaviors were shaped by the micropolitics surrounding their everyday lives – the very details that population research got rid of in the process of making globally discernible, “scientific” knowledge. This book, relying chiefly on the sources that reflected the voices of elite, male bureaucrats, statesmen, doctors, and population experts, who were in the “governing” camp in the population-governing exercise, pointed to the possibility that this kind of scientific chauvinism might have shaped the ways in which the concept of the “governed” was constructed and acted upon – via the science that these elite men were keen to incorporate for the governing purposes.

Rather paradoxically, due to the expansiveness of the field’s scope, the criticism of this chauvinism embedded in the interplay between the science of population and modern governance has come from the discipline of demography. This criticism peaked around the time when the International Conference on Population and Development took place in Cairo in 1994. Coinciding with the conference, which expanded the scope of policy discussion from one that focused on population control to a more holistic perspective that located family planning broadly in the arena of reproductive health rights and social development, feminist demographers such as Susan Watkins and Harriet Presser proclaimed that the science–policy nexus buttressing family planning in developing countries since the 1960s had been perpetuating a population discourse that overlooked the agency of the people who were on the receiving end of the initiatives.⁵¹ In Japan, too, historical works incorporating a similar, critical approach to the analysis of the relationship between the discourse of population, governance, and the making of agency are quickly growing, in particular in works that study reproductive and family politics.⁵²

Population science and scientists critically informed this very relationship over the last century and a half, while determining the contours of modern Japan and the Japanese. In turn, population science today looks the way it does precisely because it was directly molded by the specific economic, social, and political conditions that constructed the self-understanding of Japan and the Japanese throughout the period. The science of population will continue to develop and shape – and be shaped by – statecraft as long as the population is implicated in socioeconomic problems that affect the nation’s health and wealth. In Japan specifically, it will thrive by fulfilling its assigned role as a policy science by engaging with official efforts to curb the socioeconomic problems attached to the country’s aging, low-fertility, and shrinking population. But a challenge lies ahead. One of the most pressing conundrums is: How does science adequately represent the population of Japan for policymaking without essentializing the category of “the Japanese population,” especially in today’s politics, which are increasingly exposed to globalization and multiculturalism? As the science–policy nexus continues to underpin the legal practice, social fabric, and national identities and experiences of people residing in the country, the science of population will be compelled to engage with this kind of question more than ever before.