Wombs of Empire : Population Discourses and Biopolitics in Modern Japan

Japan's contemporary struggle with low fertility rates is a well-known issue, as are the country's efforts to bolster their population in order to address attendant socioeconomic challenges. However, though this anxiety about and discourse around population is thought of as relatively recent phenomenon, government and medical intervention in reproduction and fertility are hardly new in Japan. The "population problem (__jinko mondai__)" became a buzzword in the country over a century ago, in the 1910s, with a growing call among Japanese social scientists and social reformers to solve what were seen as existential demographic issues. In this book, Sujin Lee traces the trajectory of population discourses in interwar and wartime Japan, and positions them as critical sites where competing visions of modernity came into tension. Lee destabilizes the essentialized notions of motherhood and population by dissecting gender norms, modern knowledge, and government practices, each of which played a crucial role in valorizing, regulating, and mobilizing women's maternal bodies and responsibilities in the name of population governance. Bringing a feminist perspective and Foucauldian theory to bear on the history of Japan's wartime scientific fascism, Lee shows how anxieties over demographics have undergirded justifications for ethnonationalism and racism, colonialism and imperialism, and gender segregation for much of Japan's modern history. Contents List of Figures Acknowledgments A Note on Romanization and Names INTRODUCTION. Population: A Discursive Site of En-gendering Life ONE The Population Problem and Utopian Remedies TWO Voluntary Motherhood: The Feminist Politics of Birth Control THREE Scientific and Imperialist Solutions to Overpopulation FOUR Building a Biopolitical State: The Mobilization of Health for Total War FIVE “Fertile Womb Battalion”: The Gender and Racial Politics of Motherhood EPILOGUE The Continued Politics of the “Population Problem” Glossary Notes Bibliography Index