Podcast Summary

Podcast: New Books Network

Episode: Kristin Roebuck, "Japan Reborn: Race and Eugenics from Empire to Cold War"
Air date: February 10, 2026
Host(s): Dain (A), Nathan (C)
Guest: Kristin Roebuck (B)

Episode Overview

Kristin Roebuck joins the New Books Network to discuss her new book, Japan Reborn: Race and Eugenics from Empire to Cold War. The conversation centers on how Japan’s ideas about race and mixed blood evolved rapidly from the late imperial period to the postwar era, challenging the simplistic view that democracies are inherently more racially inclusive than empires. Roebuck’s research examines policies, ideologies, and practices from the 1930s to the 1950s, focusing on topics such as sex, reproduction, mixed-race children, adoption, and the role of women's bodies in both imperial and nationalistic projects.

Key Discussion Points and Insights

How the Project Began & Evolving Research Questions

[01:20–09:21]

• Chance Beginnings: Roebuck began researching after being struck by Japan’s nationwide criminalization of prostitution in 1956, a major reversal from previous centuries of regulation and even encouragement of sex work.

  • She traces the shift back to postwar anxieties over "Konketsu Ji" (mixed-race children), born to Japanese mothers and foreign soldiers during occupation.
  • “I stumbled across...an uproar over mixed blood children...Japanese women who had sexual contact with foreign soldiers were often despised by other Japanese, and so were the mixed blood children they conceived.” (Roebuck, 04:10)

• Abortion & Policy: The uproar led to widespread illegal abortions, even sanctioned by government agents targeting mixed-race fetuses. This contributed to revisions in abortion law and the criminalization of prostitution.

• Intellectual Contradiction: Roebuck was struck by the stark contrast between the imperial promotion of mixed blood as eugenically and politically desirable and the xenophobic nationalism that emerged after defeat:

  • “How is it that within a short couple of years after World War II, a supposedly mixed blood people, once they lose their empire, start aborting and otherwise expelling mixed blood children...?” (Roebuck, 06:11)

• Conceptual Evolution: She realized “race” is as much about lumping (“including” diverse groups) as splitting (“excluding” undesired groups).

  • “Race is a concept that lumps some people together and splits other people apart from the community...” (Roebuck, 07:51)

Theorizing Race in an Asian Context

[09:36–17:15]

• Challenges of Translation: Roebuck and the hosts discussed the difficulties of applying North American theories of race to the Japanese context.

  • The term "minzoku" (often translated as "ethnicity") doesn’t map neatly onto English terms or concepts.
  • “I don’t translate it, for the most part. I leave it ‘minzoku’ so people can see what the Japanese in question really meant.” (Roebuck, 13:14)

• Local Contingency: Both the concept and deployment of “race” and “ethnicity” in Asia are uniquely shaped by historical, colonial, and nationalist dynamics. The “logic of pure blood” was sometimes used by subject peoples (Koreans, Chinese) to assert their claims against Japanese rule, not only as a tool of oppression.

  • “The logic of pure blood...is being used in some cases by the oppressed peoples to try to justify their own liberation. And that’s challenging and difficult to try to translate.” (Roebuck, 16:40)

Eugenics, Biopolitics, and the History of Science

[17:15–25:47]

• Gap in Scholarship: While there is abundant research on eugenics and biopolitics, few studies foreground race in analyzing Japanese population management.

  • Many Japanese eugenic laws (like the Eugenic Protection Law) ostensibly focused on disability and disease, not race, partly due to postwar censorship and geopolitical conditions.
  • “There are all kinds of times that ostensibly race-neutral laws are in fact applied in racially conscious ways, targeting members of minority racialized communities.” (Roebuck, 23:22)

• Changing Targets: Key eugenic leaders in Japan (e.g., Nagai Hisomu) shifted targets for exclusion over time—from the Chinese during the height of empire to mixed-race children after defeat.

Inclusion, Exclusion, and the Shifting Boundaries of Nation and Family

[25:47–38:45]

• Imperial Pragmatism: The Japanese empire claimed superiority to Western powers by asserting racial inclusivity and mixed-blood pride. Imperial propaganda encouraged intermarriage and adoption, distinguishing itself from racist policies in the U.S. or Nazi Germany.

  • “In fact, they were encouraging intermarriage as a way to bind...diverse populations together into one allegedly harmonious family state.” (Roebuck, 30:59)

• Strategic Ideology: Marginalized groups—including Korean intellectuals and feminists—sometimes used imperial mixed-race ideologies for upward mobility and self-advocacy.

  • Feminists reframed their role as “the reproductive organs of empire” as a patriotic mission rather than subjugation.

• Rapid Reversals After Defeat: The empire's sudden loss triggered a shift from inclusivity to fierce xenophobia; previously staunch advocates of blood mixing reversed their views or went silent.

  • “Most of them just go quiet. After the war, they stop publishing studies along those lines. Ishiwara Fusao continues studying mixed blood children and he just reverses his findings.” (Roebuck, 36:19)

• Changing of the Guard: Some ideologues abandoned their old views, others simply disappeared from public view, and new bureaucratic elites (especially in public health) shifted the emphasis to racial exclusion, empowered by their prominence under the U.S. occupation.

Adoption, Deservingness, and Cold War Empire

[41:03–48:32]

• Adoption as Social Engineering: In the imperial era, Japan promoted adoption—both literal and symbolic—as a way of incorporating conquered peoples and presenting conquest as benevolence.

• Postwar Shifts: After WWII, the U.S. became the primary “adopter” via transnational adoption of mixed-race children from Japan and Korea—a little-known but significant form of Cold War racial management.

  • “Sawada Miki is the person who probably did the single most work to render mixed blood children...into social orphans and make them available for adoption out of the country.” (Roebuck, 46:14)
  • Sawada made children available for scientific study and lobbied for U.S. immigration law to accept them, furthering both eugenic and nationalistic goals.

• International Patterns: These practices paralleled similar moves in Korea, with religious charities and U.S. laws facilitating the “removal” of mixed-race children as a solution to racial anxieties generated by the U.S. military presence.

• Quotable Moment on Adoption:

  • “International adoption emerges as this mechanism for the United States to try to manage the racial and sexual tensions of its empire and its new alliances in the Cold War with Japan and with South Korea.” (Roebuck, 48:41)

Concluding Reflections & Future Research

[51:43–54:52]

• Ongoing Projects: Roebuck is continuing research in two directions:

  1. A longer history of adoption, child labor, and trafficking in and around the Japanese empire.
  2. Life, collaboration, and conflict in internment and POW camps in the Pacific during World War II.
  • “I’m looking at these internment camps...collaboration and competition between different communities in the camps and the Americans in order to try to make life livable and rebuild on these shattered Pacific islands.” (Roebuck, 53:08)

Notable Quotes & Timestamps

• On race as both inclusion and exclusion:
  “Race is a concept that lumps some people together and splits other people apart from the community and from the rights and privileges of belonging...”
  (Roebuck, 07:51)

• On the difficulty of translating “minzoku”:
  “Translation is actually a conclusion, right? It can cut off certain kinds of meanings that may come out of the archive if we don’t rush to a translation.”
  (Roebuck, 13:40)

• On rapid change in racial thought:
  “I was surprised how quickly it could happen that people would totally, radically reverse their position on questions of racial and national identity and whether or not blood mixing is politically useful and eugenically fruitful or fundamentally destructive.”
  (Roebuck, 08:43)

• On adoption and deservingness:
  “Sawada Miki...spent a lot of time trying to collect mixed blood children, sometimes in violation of the law, actually essentially kidnapping them, taking them away from mothers who wanted to raise them...her explicit goal was to get as many mixed blood children as possible out of Japan.”
  (Roebuck, 46:14)

• On adoption’s Cold War role:
  “International adoption emerges as this mechanism for the United States to try to manage the racial and sexual tensions of its empire and its new alliances in the Cold War with Japan and with South Korea.”
  (Roebuck, 48:41)

Significant Timestamps

• [01:53] – Roebuck describes how the project began and her early surprise over postwar abortion policies targeting mixed-race children.
• [06:11] – The motivating question: Why the rapid shift from “mixed-blood empire” to racial exclusion?
• [13:14] – Theorizing race in Japan—why “minzoku” resists easy translation.
• [23:22] – Eugenics laws: Race-neutral on the surface, racially targeted in application.
• [30:59] – Contrasts between Japanese and Western empires regarding racial boundaries and intermarriage.
• [36:19] – Examples of individual ideologues reversing their stance on blood mixing.
• [48:41] – Adoption as a Cold War racial management tool.
• [53:08] – Roebuck’s future research on Pacific internment camps.

Tone and Language

The conversation blends academic rigor with personal curiosity and moments of shared reflection among scholars. Roebuck is methodical but also candid about the complexities, surprises, and moral ambiguities that arise when studying fraught histories of race, reproduction, and empire.

Summary Takeaways

• Japan’s racial ideologies were historically contingent, fluctuating rapidly in response to both domestic and geopolitical upheaval.
• The country moved from imperial ideologies of inclusive “mixed-blood” identity to postwar exclusionary nationalism, with profound effects on laws, eugenics, and the lives of women and mixed-race children.
• Race in Japan (and Asia more broadly) cannot be easily analyzed using Western conceptual frameworks; terms like “minzoku” must be approached through historical context.
• Adoption policies and practices were central to both imperial expansion and Cold War realignments, linking Japan, Korea, and the United States in transnational projects of racial engineering.
• Historian Kristin Roebuck calls for greater attention to contingency, translation, and agents’ positions—reminding us that ideological reversals and pragmatic adaptations are common in modern history.