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Kristin Roebuck, "Japan Reborn: Race and Eugenics from Empire to Cold War" (Columbia UP, 2025)
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- [00:01]
A
Welcome to the New Books Network. In the Global north, the notion of cultural mosaic is widely embraced as a sign of democratic and inclusionary society moving beyond racial and ethnic divisions toward diversity. In her book, historian Kristin Roebuck challenges this assumption by tackling the question, why did Japan embrace, quote, mixed blood as an authoritarian empire, yet turn to xenophobic racial, racial nationalism as a Cold War democracy? Through in depth and rigorous historical research, Roebuck traces the fraught history of sex, reproduction, race and empire building in Japan from the 1930s to 1950s. Through her scholarship, she crucially demonstrates how discourses on sex, mixed race, children and adoption revolved around the controlled women and their bodies to strengthen nationalism and imperialism. Nathan and I are going to be co hosts today and we are really excited to welcome Kristen today at the New Books Network to talk about her new book, Japan, Race and Eugenics From Empire to Cold War. Kristen, welcome to the show.
- [01:16]
B
Oh, thank you so much for having me. Thank you, Nathan. And thank you, Dain.
- [01:20]
C
Yeah, it's great to have you here, Kristin. So I'm going to ask the first question and I want to start out with what's basically the traditional question, which is how you came to do the research that became this book. But I also wanted to sort of add to that. I mean, I remember seeing you present some of the preliminary research for this when you were a graduate student. And one of the things I'd be really interested in is if you could tell us a little bit how your perspective on the material, the central questions and issues of your research has shifted over time.
- [01:54]
B
Yeah, well, it's actually changed a lot. So that's a good question. I guess I can say. Right. Since you already brought up the fact that I was once a graduate student, I never set out to study race and race mixing in Japan. I first stumbled across this issue and the topic of konketsu ji, or mixed race children, when I was trying to understand what I thought was a totally different topic, which is why in 1956, Japan criminally banned prostitution nationwide for the first time in its history. And you know, that's roughly 10 years after Japan loses World War II. And I thought it was a really remarkable shift. And I wanted to understand what struck me as a radical reversal in Japanese policy, given that this criminal ban came after centuries of the Japanese state regulating and taxing and licensing and in the cases of wartime comfort stations, organizing and administering outright the trade in women and girls and sex. And so while I was trying to understand this pretty radical shift, within a 10 year period from 1946 to 1956, you go from organizing comfort stations to criminalizing prostitution. I stumbled across the work of Sarah Kovner and Lori Watt, who have since published two books, Sarah Kovner's Occupying Power and Laurie Watts, When Empire Comes Home. So they're looking at this early post war period when Japan is occupied by foreign powers. And they, both of them end up repeatedly referencing a post war uproar over mixed blood children. So these are Konketsu Ji who were born to Japanese mothers and they're fathered by foreign soldiers in the context of Japan's defeat and occupation after World War II. And Japanese women who had sexual contact with foreign soldiers, it turns out, were often despised by other Japanese and so were the mixed blood children that they conceived. So Lori Watt was the first to tip me off to the fact that the acrimony was so intense that despite the fact that abortion was strictly illegal at the time, illegal abortion was widely practiced by medical professionals deliberately targeting Konketsu Ji, and was even practiced by government agents in what seems to be a nationwide campaign to abort Konketsu Ji. And so I do have a chapter about this in the book where I describe how this will to abort mixed blood fetuses contributed eventually to the selective decriminalization of abortion in the Eugenic Protection Law. And it also, by 1956, contributes to the criminalization of prostitution, in part because prostitution was associated with women who are, excuse me, selling their bodies to foreign soldiers and giving birth to mixed blood children. So all of that I found fascinating and very darkly disturbing and also kind of surprising because at the same time I was reading scholarship on the Japanese Empire, for instance, the work of Ogume Eiji, who very convincingly shows that the Japanese Empire prided itself as a mixed blood empire. And in fact, the Japanese had been defining themselves for decades by this point as a mixed blood and therefore superior people. And I thought, you know, there's something here that I don't quite understand. 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 from their nation state, from the body politicians? So I could not find an answer to that in the established scholarship, which is why I ended up writing a book about it. So, Nathan, to get back to your question about how my perspective on this question or the central issues change over time, I started off looking at the post war period, this period where there's intense acrimony and Anxiety over interracial sex and mixed blood children in Japan. So this moment where the empire has collapsed. And so I started off with the perspective, and I think also it just made sense to me as an American that race is operating as a concept, you know, of divisiveness as a tool for dividing and subjugating people. As I studied more. As I did more research, and the first chapters in my book focus on Imperial Japan. But those are the last chapters that I researched and wrote. What I started to have to grapple with much more seriously was the idea that race can. It's as much about lumping as it is about splitting. So race is a concept that lumps some people together and splits other people apart from a community and from the rights and privileges of belonging to that community. And I had to start to take more seriously the lumping aspects or the ways in which people in Imperial Japan used race to fuse together, sometimes against their will. A lot of diverse populations in colonized and conquered lands, and making the argument that precisely through blood mixing or through fusing together a lot of different people into one, the Japanese Empire can expand and the race gets stronger. There was an argument that blood mixing is actually eugenically superior to preserving, quote, unquote, pure blood in the imperial era. So I had to start grappling more seriously with sort of two faces of race, the lumping and the splitting, the inclusion and the exclusion and the different ways that that will play out in different historical moments. I think another thing that I had to take much more seriously as I expanded my research into this longer duray, is the idea of contingency. I was actually really surprised by a lot of what I ended up reading in the imperial era. Having come from reading all of this stuff in the post war era, all of these sources that are so intensely concerned about blood mixing. I was surprised how quickly people change their minds. And in the book I look at a few people in particular, and then I also try to establish just more broad patterns in Japanese discourse. But I was, you know, even sort of expecting that there was a kind of a shift after the collapse of empire. 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. So that's been a lesson to me that I now apply more broadly as a historian, as a researcher, as a teacher of history, but also just looking at the world that we're all living in, things can change really fast and we should never assume that people are going to be consistent in their ideologically positioning over even a relatively short period of time, say five to 10 years.
- [09:21]
C
Yeah. Thank you, Kristen. I'm going to come back to that last theme that you brought up there, the really rapid shift that we see in a later question. But I want to turn this back over to Diane for next question.
- [09:36]
A
Awesome. Yeah. Thank you, Nathan. Yeah, I think the next couple of questions, I think centers like race, and then, you know, like, I'm thinking about that as a scholar. So I really loved what you said about, you know, how through your research, you said that, you know, race really operates as a concept to divide and subjugate, and it's much about lumping as well as splitting. So, you know, there are, like, dual aspects of inclusion and exclusion that you see in Japan. And, you know, I think as a scholar, you know, who studies Korea with, you know, most of my theoretical training on race, that mostly really does centers like the U.S. i would say I found your book to be particularly relevant. And then, you know, I think this is like, the sort of, like, theoretical question that I'm also grappling with too, is that, you know, like, how do we talk about race in an Asian context? And in particular, you know, like, I'm interested in how you incorporate theories that are in, like, different historical and, like, geographical context, because I'm always afraid of just, like, using theories and taking that out of context. But I thought that in this book, you know, this was so, like, historically grounded and you talk about race in a very nuanced ways. So, yeah, I wanted to ask you, you know, like, you know, how. How you think about race, you know, with our particular training that is rooted in North America, but then also paying attention to, you know, like, local context, the histories, you know, the differences that come. Geographical and historical context.
- [11:13]
B
Oh, thank you so much for this question. I. I think that I have a similar background to you intellectually. In some ways. You know, I'm trying to study this process of. Of racialization and the. The relationship between race and other kinds of social and political formations and processes in an Asian context. But so much of the theoretical apparatus is actually coming from. From someplace other than Asia. So it's coming from North America or it's coming from Europe. Right. And so this is something I grappled with a lot, and I found a lot of the theoretical or sociological or even, you know, looking at history, historical studies of race. So much good work has come out of the North American context or the European context, and that's been very generative for me. But it's also been at times deeply frustrating because there's a set of assumptions in play and that don't necessarily map correctly onto other parts of the world. So one of the things that we'll see how the book is received by scholars of Asia. One of the things that I mention in my introduction is that there is a tendency, a tradition to translate this term minzoku, that occurs in so many of the primary sources. I'm looking at almost all of them to translate this term into English as ethnicity or ethnic nation. And there are Japanese scholars who've already sort of said, you know, that that doesn't necessarily work for two reasons. One, that the Japanese meaning is just so different, it's a different context, and two, that the meaning changes. You know, even the meaning of ethnicity in the English language, it changes across time, across history. So it's very difficult to establish a one to one stable correlation between this Japanese term minzoku and any kind of English language term. But that translation has become standard. And I argue in my book, basically, I don't translate it, for the most part, I leave it minzoku so people can see what the Japanese in question really meant. What were they saying when they said minzoku? What's the context and therefore what's the meaning? I'm very much aligned with Wittgenstein, this idea that use is meaning. So you can't presume that minzoku means ethnic group. You can't even presume that people in, say, imperial Japan were operating with a sense that there's a difference between ethnicity and race, or frankly, that people in the same time period in the United States were operating with that assumption. You really have to pay careful attention to what they think and what they mean. So I guess one of my sort of pleas is to look very, very carefully at the archive and take seriously the ideas and the attitudes that are being conveyed by different historical actors rather than jumping to conclusions. And 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. I think another thing that I would say is that when I'm thinking about race and trying to translate between this idea in the Western academy and in Anglophone scholarship and what I'm seeing in Asian contexts, it makes it more and more clear to me that obviously what happened in the west is also culturally specific. Right? And what's happening in Japan and Korea around this time is culturally specific. And it's historically specific and it's contingent. So the fact that the Japanese Empire is expanding provides an opportunity and a motive for people in Japan, but also people in Korea and people in China to redefine their racial identity in order to either align with the Japanese Empire, and I give some instances of that, to become part of that lump, right, that lump of Japanese, that increasingly powerful group, or to redefine their racial identity and that of people around them as racially separate from the Japanese and to sort of resist some of the Pan Asian imperialism that the Japanese Empire was promoting in order to bolster their own claim for sovereignty. And there are people in China and there are people in Korea and people elsewhere who specifically argued that they were a, a different race or even a pure race with pure blood that was different from Japanese blood in order to justify sovereignty and independence in Japan's imperial era and then on afterwards into the post war era. That kind of logic remains really powerful. So there's something kind of unsettling, I think, for a person whose maybe initial studies of race and the idea of a pure race come from a white supremacist context. Right. So looking at the history of the United States or looking at Nazi Germany, you're trained to think of the idea of pure blood as a tool that is used exclusively to oppress and even justify the genocide of non white peoples. But the logic of pure blood is operating slightly differently. I don't, I don't mean to sanitize it. There are very dark realities to this sort of pure blood nationalism that is developing in an East Asian context and during and after the Japan's imperial era. But it is being used in some cases by the oppressed peoples to try to justify their own liberation. And that's a challenging and difficult thing to try to translate into English. This is just one of. I could go on for probably hours about this, but this is one of the many kinds of complexities that I'm grappling with in this book and that I hope other scholars will also join me in this conversation.
- [17:15]
C
So, Kristin, you brought up a couple of things here that I'd like to sort of resonate with in my question. And the last was sort of thinking about your identity as part of a group of scholars that are working on similar topics and thinking about the race and biopolitics as it has operated, particularly in Japan in the Japanese Empire, but in asia in the 20th century. And I wanted to ask you a little bit to expand a little bit on how this book in particular is in dialogue with Recent scholarship on population and biopolitics. You mentioned Lori Watts, Sarah Kovner, who was on the podcast, also Sujin Lee, Wombs of Empire, Ayahome's Science for Governing Japan's Population. And I assume there's also a number of outstanding scholars writing about this in Japanese as well. So what is it that you have found has been sort of challenging to be part of this sort of longer historiographical dialogue about race, empire, its aftermath, biopolitics in Japan, and how that fits in with these larger conversations that are being had about these topics?
- [18:33]
B
I think actually it's an interesting question because there is so much good scholarship in English and especially in Japanese on the history of, of biopolitics, state management of the population, also eugenics, which is, you know, originally as eugenics develops in Japan, not a state sanctioned movement. But eventually, in Ayahome's work and others talk about this, eugenicists really do get a foothold in government and start to, to reshape, surveil and reshape the population. So there's so much good scholarship that I'm building on in my work, but for the most part, the people who are doing these sorts of studies of population are not conceptualizing race. So this was my challenge. How do I rethink the history of science and the state management of population, and how do I rethink the history of eugenics in Japan from the perspective of race? So this maybe deserves a little bit of explanation. Again, if. If you're coming to the topic of eugenics from, say, the North Atlantic context, the assumption may be that eugenics is always about race. And it would be impossible to have a deep historiography on the topic of eugenics that doesn't frontally grapple with the problem of race. What I found when I was reading around, there's not enough, I think, scholarship in English on eugenics in Japan. There's a lot in Japanese, and I found most of it really doesn't talk about race. And for a while that used to puzzle me, for the most part, what they're looking at. Scholars like Matsubarioko Suzuki, Zenji Oginomiho, just to name a few. They're looking at the control of reproduction and disability and hereditary disease. After a while, I began to understand why they're relatively quiet on the topic of race. I think there are two reasons for this, and one is the Eugenic Protection Law, which I do write about in my book. On the face of it, the Eugenic Protection Law is not about race. It's about disease and hereditary disability. And so a lot of the scholarship and a lot of the activism that develops in late 20th and 21st century Japan that is, you know, all about fighting for people's rights to be free of the coercive approach. For instance, the Eugenic Protection law authorized involuntary sterilization of people who were deemed likely to pass on undesirable genes to their offspring. So there's a fight in late 20th and 21st century Japan to undo that law, which is eventually successful, and then to get compensation to victims of state managed sterilization. So a lot of the scholarship is focused on that issue, which makes a lot of sense. One of the things I argue in my book though is that the Eugenic Protection law, while that doesn't explicitly target race or race mixing, and there are reasons that it could not because it's passed under Allied occupation, it is in fact imagined by the people who create it as a tool for racial engineering. Not only as a tool, but also as a tool for racial engineering. So I look at some of the thought and the commentary and the published works of the people who are behind this and their antipathy to race mixing, which is deepening pretty rapidly under occupation. So I, you know, I have to do something that in part we're working with less sources and less overt sources because there some things governments do, you have to, you have to sort of double speak and not admit the exact thing that you're up to. Politicians do this all the time. They'll say they're doing one thing and do another. And so I compare the Eugenic Protection law to, for instance, in 1933, the, you know, the Nazis have come to power in Germany and they pass a law which is the model for Japan's later law, the Eugenic Protection Law. They pass a law to also control reproduction along eugenic lines. And the Nazi law does not mention race either. But it's well known that the Nazis had racial targets in mind and did actually use that law to sterilize mixed blood Michelinge as they were called mixed blood Germans. So I argue that basically the same thing is going on in Japan, that 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. So I guess the other thing I would say about my work is that in this sort of shift I'm trying to make the turn I'm trying to make in studies of eugenics in Japan, there's another good reason that scholars of eugenics and the History of science in Japan haven't worked as much on the question of race, haven't centered it as much as I do, is because as I discovered late in my research process, when I was moving back into the Imperial era, a lot of the leaders of Japan's eugenics movement barely talked about race or race mixing in the 1910s, 1920s, even into the 1930s. They're just not worried about it. They don't get worried about it until very, very late in their careers. So I look at Nagai Somu as one example of this absolute leader in the Japanese eugenics movement and also one of the guys who's most responsible for getting forced sterilization law passed in Japan based on this Nazi model. I made a mistake early on in my career. I assumed that he. He favored the Nazi approach to the idea of pure blood and preserving racial purity. I made that mistake in part because I was looking at some of his later work where he's very explicit that he thinks any kind of blood mixing is basically race suicide and will destroy Japan from within. But he doesn't publish that kind of screed against blood mixing until the Allied occupation. And if you look at his earlier work, he barely mentions blood mixing at all, and certainly not as. As an existential threat to the race. The earliest work I was ever able to find by Nagai Somu, who really start when he. When he starts to think that maybe race mixing is a threat, it's not until 1943, and to my surprise, in that context, he's currently working in occupied China, and he starts to say, maybe we shouldn't be interbreeding with these Chinese. And that surprised me. It was originally not white or black soldiers that he was worried about. It was Chinese. And of course, I have a chapter in the book about this, the rising sense in Imperial Japan that the idea of blood mixing might be all well and good, except when it comes to the Chinese who had been resisting Japan and their invasion for. For years by that point.
- [25:48]
A
Thank you, Kristen. Yeah, I think with this question, it's continuing, you know, like, what you were speaking about, you know, in terms of, like, contingencies. I really love, like, how you framed it, like, how quickly people change their mind, you know, their positions. And then also, you know, like, with this example with, you know, like, Nakai Hisomu, you know, like, thinking about how, oh, it was actually the Chinese that he was worried about. And then, you know, that really challenging, you know, like, what we think about race and ethnicity. You know, is there a division? And I Also love what you said about like, one to one translation. Minjoku in Korean also means is a minjok. And it's also, you know, I think, like a contested term in a sense that, you know, like most people translated to, you know, like ethnicity. But then I think that, you know, like, oh, it means different things, you know, like in different contexts. So thank you for pointing that out. Yeah. So I think with this question, yeah, I think I wanted to think more met with you and Nathan about, you know, I think when I was reading your book, as you were saying, I think I was struck by this contingency and then also what I took for granted, you know, when it comes to politics. So I was fascinated by, you know, like, how you were writing about, you know, all these, like, people who identify as maybe quote, unquote, like feminist, for example, you know, or like Marxist. And then also like Korean intellectuals as well, who advocated for blood mixing. So, for example, you talk about Ueda and then, you know, how he was like, advocating for blood mixing, you know, as part of like, imperial expansion, so the role of, you know, like Zainichi Koreans and then their position within this imperial project in terms of inclusion and exclusion. And then as you talked about earlier, I do think that this question of, you know, like, how inclusion and exclusion is not really a binary per se, but how it comes to play in, you know, this, like, very fraught politics of race, I think is a really interesting one. So, yeah, I wanted to ask you more about, you know, like, your thoughts on, you know, like, these different people and their archives that you looked at. And then they're like politics and then the changes and how or how that may be countered or aligned with your preconceptions about the role of politics and positionality of the authors in terms of their position in the discourses on race mixing. Yeah.
- [28:32]
B
Thank you. It is something that puzzled me and I think has puzzled a lot of us. If you come from, you know, the. The 21st century perspective where almost everybody, except maybe the far right in Japan, has accepted the idea that the Japanese Empire was bad. Right. Just a bad idea, oppressive and illogical. And we look at the ways the empire justified itself, the propaganda, the ideology, and we say, well, obviously that was false. Some of that ideology is explicitly about how the Japanese Empire is so much better than Western empires because they are not racially exclusive. So the Japanese Empire is explicitly saying, look, we are much, much better than say, even our allies in Nazi Germany, much less our enemies in Britain or the United States, because we can include Anybody, we're not racist the way white people are racist. So when we take over Korea, or when we take over the Philippines, when we take over China, when we take over Southeast Asia, New guinea, all of those people get to be part of our imperial community. Maybe not exactly as equals, but it was a big deal in Japan, this argument that, you know, the Japanese are already mixed blood, and we are willing, indeed eager, to mix our blood to intermarry and have children and build families with all of these diverse peoples. And it is worth emphasizing that that is quite different from what's going on in places like the United States in Nazi German, where you have explicitly racialized laws. The borders are racialized both in terms of national borders. So in the United States, Asians were not allowed to immigrate, and also the borders of the family. So intermarriage is illegal. Miscegenation is a crime. None of that is true in Japan. In fact, they were encouraging intermarriage as a way to bind all of these diverse populations together into one allegedly harmonious family state. And so, again, looking back at this sort of failed empire building from the perspective after World War II, when we know so much about how brutal Japanese occupation and colonialism was, it's easy to write all of that off as if it wouldn't be persuasive to anybody at the time, but it actually was persuasive to a lot of people at the time. Not to say everybody agreed with it, but I do. For instance, I talk about this fellow, Ueda Tatsuo, who. That's his Japanese name, the name that he adopted, but he was born and raised in Korea with a Korean name. And I focus in on him. He becomes a sort of propagandist for this mixed blood vision of Japan and insists that the Koreans, too, are Japanese by virtue of their blood ties with Japan. And he's an interesting sort of case study because it's so clear that he's using the mixed blood ideology of the empire to advocate for upward mobility for Koreans and actually to take to task. And sometimes it's actually pretty strong and even dangerous language that he uses in criticizing Japanese people who will continue to discriminate against Koreans or claim that they're the real Japanese and colonized peoples are not Japanese. So. So he's just one example of this. But there are all kinds of people in the empire in the 1930s and early 1940s who are maybe lower down on the imperial hierarchy and are using this kind of propaganda for their own good or to elevate their own communities, to open up opportunities for themselves and to defend themselves against prejudice, defend themselves against an exclusionary hierarchy, and claim their part in the empire of Japan. So feminists too, I look at some of these feminists who are very enthusiastic proponents of blood mixing as a model of imperial expansion, feminists who are enthusiastic eugenicists. And part of what they're doing is saying if women are the reproductive organs of empire, which is really how they're being treated in this era, then instead of viewing that as a subjugation of women, they said, like, actually this is our holy mission and this is our patriotic purpose, and this makes us crucial and our voice is crucial to the empire. So they're trying to use the imperial ideology to bolster their own importance and get a say and get a stake and be taken seriously and be given some kind of consideration in the empire as it's being built. It only looks ridiculous to the extent it looks ridiculous after the fact, because we know that the empire collapses, but they didn't know that was going to happen. So I think there's a lot of intelligence and rationality actually in these people trying to stake a claim and even change the parameters of imperial inclusion by using the dominant ideology that's available to them.
- [33:59]
C
Yeah, I think, Kristen, the answer that you've just given really is a testament to one of the things you said earlier, which is the importance of trying to take people seriously and treat them as agents who had worldviews that made sense to them at the time. And so this gets back to this sort of at least apparent paradox that's I think, at the core of the book itself, which is this rapid shift from the privileging of blood mixing to that of racial purity so quickly after defeat. I wonder if you could tell us using some of these examples of individuals you've talked about, or I guess, is this a changing of the guard or is it these individuals, ideologues, activists, bureaucrats, et cetera, Are they apostatizing? Are they abandoning their previous beliefs? If so, what do they say about that? How do they reconcile with the changes of position? Or is this just generational change?
- [35:03]
B
Yeah, so I worked so hard to try to figure that out, and there are opportunities to really hone in on this. And then there are limitations. Right. Because some of the people who are really active in spreading a pro mixing ideology during the imperial era, they just go quiet after the war and it may be because they realize that they're out of step with the times and nobody wants to hear from them. And all of their like, pro mixing stuff anymore, so they just stop talking about it. Maybe they didn't change their minds. It's very difficult for me to know others of them. I trace a few individuals in detail and I can say they absolutely changed their position and quite radically. So Nagai Hisomu, I've already mentioned, he's one example, Koyama Eizo, I don't talk about him as much in the book, but he's a really good example of a prominent scholar and ideologue and government official who is actually promoting blood mixing during the Imperial era. And then by 1944, so just as the Empire is imploding, he turns against it. And there are some other examples that I cite in the book of people who are talking about their eugenicists, medical scholars and researchers who are actually publishing studies during World War II. Ishiwara Fusao is one example of mixed blood children who were born in the Imperial era. And he's saying, you know, eugenically they're superior to pure blood people. And there are a lot of eugenicists in the Imperial Era who publish studies like that. 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. So after World War II, when he's looking at Konketsu Ji who were born during the occupation era and after, he says these children are dysgenic, they are genetically unfit, they are prone to all kinds of diseases and mental disabilities and social maladaptation, and they're just not part of the Japanese race. And that is new. He didn't used to say stuff like that in the Imperial era, although he did express some concerns about Konketsu Ji. They were not at all those sorts of concerns. And then there are other people I point to. Koya Yoshio is a good example of this, who was consistently critical of blood mixing. And so he's a really important figure for sort of bridging between the Imperial era and he's a eugenicist who becomes an important official in the Ministry of Welfare and then goes on to lead the National Institute of Health after World War II. And he's intimately involved in the creation of the Eugenic Protection Law. So he was from the 1930s onward, always kind of critical of blood mixing. But the intensity and the tenor of his critique really does shift during the war. So during the war he starts talking kind of incessantly about how dangerous it is to mix blood with the Chinese. He explicitly compares them to Jews and the Japanese to Germans. And he says, look, the Chinese are a threat to us the way Jews are a threat to the Germans. We have to treat them as such. After World War II, the shift that he makes is not to become less alarmist about the threats of blood mixing. He just changes the target. So it's no longer the Chinese or the primary threat. Now it's these foreign soldiers in Japan, and they're mixed blood children.
- [38:45]
A
Children.
- [38:47]
B
So to some extent, what we see is some people are changing their minds, some people are going quiet. When you ask about change of the guard, I actually think this matters a lot because there are some of these people, Koyo Yoshio is a good example, Koyama Eizo is a good example, who decide late in the war that they are absolutely opposed to blood mixing, at least with the Chinese. And then they get promoted during the occupation. While a lot of members of what used to be much more powerful government agencies, such as the Government General in Korea, which had promoted intermarriage and blood mixing, those entire agencies are shut down and the people who led them are purged from government. So I think there is a significant changing of the guard. The Ministry of Welfare and associated public health institutions gain a lot more power during the occupation. And their leadership had, not universally, but to a significant degree, partly under the influence of Koyayoshio, had really converged on the idea that blood mixing is dangerous. An idea that was not as widespread, not as widely accepted in other government institutions that are shut down and among other bureaucrats who are purged because of their pro imperial activism. So the US Led occupation of Japan kind of. I think this is not deliberate. It's one of those contingent developments during the occupation. They're so focused on trying to purge imperialists of the Japanese government, but they need to hang on to public health officials who can help them get public health work done. And they're not really looking into. They don't really care, I think what exactly are the eugenic beliefs of these public health officials who end up empowered under the occupation? They're not being questioned about that. They're just being questioned about whether or not they participated in and oversaw the occupation of all of these foreign lands. And it turns out the Ministry of Welfare, those officials, are not held responsible for developments outside Japanese borders, and therefore they're largely protected and promoted during the occupation.
- [41:03]
A
Yeah. Thank you, Kristin. Yeah. I think the next question that I have is in some ways related to.
- [41:11]
B
What you were saying.
- [41:12]
A
And then it really does make Me think about these conflicting discourses on social good versus imperial activism because I wanted to talk about the historical adoption and then I think reading about Sawada Miki in that chapter and then some of the really like, for me, very shocking narratives that like, you know, really you highlight well with, you know, like the hypocrisy of Sa being celebrated as, as someone, you know, who does so much social good for these poor children when, you know, like she is literally like expelling them. You know, like this is a very like eugenitist movement. I. I felt that you like highlighted that really well and how adoption is like part and parcel of, you know, like the management methods for the empire after Japan's defeat. So yeah, I would love to hear your thoughts on the history of adoption and how it's intertwined with the imperial notions of deservingness, motherhood and race. And I think that this addition is out of my personal interest. So selfishly, I wanted to ask you this question because I was interested in it. And so in my research, I actually kind of accidentally ran into the advertisement by Holt International. And you know, you talk about like Elena Shi and Arisa oh, you know, these scholars of Korea who talk about, you know, like the complicity of, you know, the U.S. and then these religious organizations that facilitates adoption so that, you know, Korea can get rid of, you know, they're like mixed blood children. So similar rhetoric. And when it came to, you know, Chingmo domestic servant who I study, I actually saw that there were a lot of like memoirs of Xin Mo that were paired with advertisement that's explicitly telling poor women like Xingmo to basically give up their children. You know, it's like obviously like framed as like, oh, this is a counseling program for, you know, poor women. You know, like, oh, we're being so great. You know, like we're helping them. We're seeing them, you know, see light and good, you know, very, very much like Samiki. Like I also struck by, you know, similarity in this courses. So yeah, so the first part of the question is, you know, like, I love to hear more about the history of adoption in Japan and how, you know, like it's tied to the notions of deservingness and motherhood. And then, you know, if there's like time and space, you know, like your understanding of, you know, like, its connection to empire building and maybe Korea, you know, but. But yeah, that's like, that's kind of more for myself.
- [44:07]
B
Oh yeah. Thank you very much for this question. So I absolutely learned so much and had to lean pretty heavily on studies of international adoption from Korea to the United States to understand what's going on in Japan, because the. The Korean case is well studied, well documented. The fact that there was ever a movement to remove specifically mixed blood children from Japan in the nineteen, late 1940s, 1950s to the United States is not well known in Japan or in the United States. It just really hasn't been studied. And it turns out that, yeah, these histories are interconnected. And I do a little bit of explaining that in my book. So to sort of back up for a second and give the long arc history of adoption as it plays through my book, I talk about this in the Imperial era, where the Empire again prides itself as a community that can incorporate all kinds of new populations as part of one big family state. And so there's this idea intermarriage and blood mixing can do it, but there's also a promotion of the idea of adoption. Either legal adoption of colonized or conquered peoples into Japanese families, or sort of symbolic adoption where especially Japanese soldiers on battlefields were celebrated for becoming adoptive fathers or adopted elder brothers to children in the regions that they were attempting to conquer, or even to captured enemy soldiers. There was a lot of talk about that, a lot of propaganda about that. And it was one of the sort of effective tools of the empire to convince people that conquest was really. It's not overpowering, it's not using violence to subjugate foreigners. It is rather saving them and incorporating them into the Japanese family. So I noticed something very interesting, and this is the long arc of my book, that after World War II, actually it's the United States that ends up adopting a lot of people effectively and also legally from conquered countries such as Japan and Korea. And again, the case of the US Importing a lot of adoptees from Korea is much better known. So what I'm talking about in the latter chapters of my book, you mentioned Sawatomiki. Sawatomiki is the person who probably did the single most work to render mixed blood children who were born in Japan after World War II into social orphans and make them available for adoption out of the country. And this was her goal. She 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. And basically she reached out, worked with different groups in the United States, worked with lobbyists, advised legislators both in Japan and in the United States, constantly pushing to try to change U.S. immigration law to allow for the importation of these orphans, because her explicit goal was to get as many mixed blood children as possible out of Japan. And one of the other points that I make in the book is that meanwhile, she is offering up the orphans that she has collected in the Elizabeth Saunders home, which she founded, I think it was, in 1948, and ran for decades. And she only gathered up mixed blood orphans in this home and those who had not been adopted overseas yet. She makes them available to Japanese eugenicists and race scientists for study. And so a lot of the studies that are published in Japan after World War II that ostensibly prove that mixed blood children are inherently dysgenic, that they're mentally and physically unfit, those studies are actually being conducted with Sawatomiki's approval in her home.
- [48:32]
A
So.
- [48:34]
B
One of the arguments that I make in the book, and that sort of triangulates basically between Japan, the United States and Korea in the history of adoption. I argue that 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. Because if the sort of furor over mixed blood children in Japan begins during the Allied occupation, it really takes off and arrives at full force in the 1950s after the occupation ends and Japan has become an ally to the United States and people who are critics of that alliance. And I dig into a lot of public intellectuals, I look at journalists and mass media, but I also dig into partisan politics. So which are the political parties in Japan that oppose the new alliance with the United States? So parties on the left and on the right, basically, of the dominant party, the Liberal Party, are continually attacking the Liberal Party for having signed an alliance that keeps US Troops in Japan in perpetuity right and up to the present day, and therefore keeps Japanese women within sexual reach of these foreign soldiers. And they basically tar the US Japan alliance as an engine for the continual reproduction of increasing stigmatized konketsu ji. So in response to this kind of outpouring of outrage and vituperation against U.S. soldiers in Japan and against the U.S. japan alliance, the United States starts to make some changes to its laws and also to its culture to welcome the adoption of mixed blood children, to welcome interracial families, so white families, also black families, adopting konketsu ji, and sometimes pure blood Japanese orphans out of Japan. And the same thing. A very similar thing is happening in South Korea at the time for very similar reasons. And the response is similar. There's this urge to get mixed blood children born of foreign soldiers out of South Korea. And the United States responds to that by creating, in a series of laws across the 1950s, culminating in 1960, 60, creating new mechanisms to lower the bar to racial immigration and lower the bar to the immigration of unaccompanied minors, as they're sometimes called, orphans, who can be incorporated into the Japanese, into the American family state in its own right. So this is the kind of Cold War endpoint of my study, which shows that the sort of position of. Of maybe the universal patriarch which Japan had aspired to in the Imperial era is now being instead taken over by the United States.
- [51:43]
C
So, Kristin, we're kind of coming up toward the end here, and I wanted to, as I began with the traditional question of how did you become interested in this work now that the book is actually out? I want to end with the traditional question of what's next for you? Obviously, this is a. A big, long project, which, even if it's a book, it could also not be quite finished. You may also be totally ready to move on. So tell us what we're thinking about.
- [52:13]
B
Well, I'm working on two projects, and the truth is, yeah, I'm not done with this. I'm ready to be done. But, I mean, there's a lot of pieces of this puzzle that I researched that I wrote up on that didn't make it into the book, in part because it was way over the word limit that my publisher gave me. So some of that stuff I still need find another place to publish it. Right. But I also have new projects that I'm working on. One of them is I'm looking at a longer Duray history of adoption and child labor and child trafficking in and beyond the Japanese Empire, which is obviously a topic I started thinking about when I was researching international adoption in the late 40s and 1950s. So that project is going to take me a while. I've published exactly one article, but I have a lot more research and thinking I need to do on that. And another project I've started working on looks at internment camps and POW camps in the South Pacific. So particularly, I've started looking at Saipan, which is the first place in 1944, where the United States takes over, and there's a very large civilian population. And so they move the civilian, you know, Japanese and multiracial population into internment camps. And I've become really fascinated to think about and try to research what life was like for people living in these camps and struggling to collaborate with the enemy. Right. Because the war is ongoing, struggle to collaborate with the Americans in order to survive. And the tensions within the camp were pretty strong, with some people saying, actually, if you collaborate, if you work with the Americans, you'll be assassinated by other Japanese who want the resistance to continue. So I'm looking at these internment camps, and there's a lot of scholarship out there about internment camps, say, in North America where Japanese and Japanese Americans were interned and to a lesser extent, in other places. But I haven't found much that's been written about these camps that were established in the middle of the war and the 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. So that's my second new project.
- [54:40]
C
Well, that sounds fantastic. And hopefully we will be able to have you back here on the podcast to talk about that in a few years. Years. And in the meantime, we'll look forward to seeing pieces of that coming out.
- [54:53]
B
Thank you so much, Nathan, and thank you dying.